Halloween is well-known for pumpkins, candy, and costumes.

But if the criminal cases in Westlaw’s database are any indication, it should also be notorious for bringing out stupidity in people.

Some people get so stupid about Halloween, in fact, that they may not even realize when the holiday actually is, such as the defendant in State v. Heard (636 N.W.2d 227).

In the early morning hours of May 29, 1999, the defendant James Heard decided to rob a Davenport, Iowa convenience store.

Apparently, Heard must have believed that late May day to be Halloween, since he said “Happy Halloween” when he entered the store.

Since it was Halloween to him, Heard decided he needed a costume to rob the store, with such consisting of a paper bag over his head with eye-hole cutouts, large safety glasses, and white athletic socks over his hands.

Despite his illustrious costume, Heard was picked up by the police, and identified by the store clerk whom he robbed.

Even if they are able to get the date right, the stupidity doesn’t end there.

Some think Halloween is the perfect night to commit a crime because you’ll be completely unidentifiable with a costume on.

Unfortunately, like the defendant in State v. Rauch (118 S.W.3d 263) learned, criminal investigators can rely on more than eyewitness testimony to discover a perpetrator’s identity.

In that case, Rauch, the boyfriend of a married woman, conspired with two other men to kill the woman’s other boyfriend because he was allegedly physically abusing her.

Despite the fact that the men were wearing costumes and committed the murder on Halloween, the police somehow were able to crack the case (apparently telling a lot of people about your plans doesn’t help your anonymity).

It seems, though, that quite a few people must think that committing crimes on Halloween with costumes is a good idea.

In Williams v. State (685 S.E.2d 282), defendant Williams was a crack dealer.

Williams was unhappy that the mother of BaKarry Bailey, a rival crack dealer, was unwilling to let anyone other than her son sell drugs out of the apartment complex where Bailey and his mother lived.

Williams and an accomplice decided to kill the competition, and did so on Halloween with costumes.

As an added twist, they were able to get Bailey to open the door to his apartment by their exclaiming “trick-or-treat,” after which they opened fire and killed him.

Although Williams and his accomplice were both wearing costumes, the police were, incredibly, still able to pin the murder on Williams.

The police were able to accomplish this feat of detective work because Williams later contacted one of Bailey’s neighbors and inquired into whether Williams was successful in his attempt to murder him.

Of course, some of the crime on Halloween is over something much more minor than drug territory: candy.

In re F.J.S. (241 S.W.3d 565) involves juveniles from rival gangs warring over (you guessed it) Halloween candy.

Our last case – State v. Carrick (2010 WL 5549046) – isn’t so much about Halloween stupidity as it is about refusing to give up.

On October 31, 2009, Jason Carrick hosted a Halloween party.

Shortly after midnight, sheriff’s deputies arrived after complaints of excessive noise, and issued Carrick a citation for disorderly conduct.

The trial court found him guilty and fined him $150.

The fact that Carrick was even willing to go to trial was tenacious enough, but Carrick actually appealed the ruling, claiming the statute was, among other things unconstitutionally vague.

He lost the appeal, and was stuck with the $150 fine.  We can only hope that his life will go on.

Naturally, Carrick could have avoided all of the trouble by just turning down the music on Halloween.

Then again, all of the above criminal cases could have been avoided if they had just turned down the stupid on Halloween.

In any case, here’s to your Halloween being fun, safe, and of course, stupidity-free.

For some “scary” Halloween laws, check out this post!

The Fourth of July will be celebrated across the country this weekend with patriotism, barbeques, drinking, and, of course, fireworks.

Obviously, fireworks aren’t legal in all states.

Before purchasing or using fireworks, make sure that doing so would be in compliance with the laws in that state.

Naturally, these laws are often ignored by many members of the populace because the temptation to use fireworks on the Fourth is just too great to resist.

Because illegal firework use can have legal consequences, there have been more than a few cases involving them.

Some of them can be attributed to carelessness, though.

For example, if you’re planning on transporting illegal fireworks in your vehicle, you probably don’t want to advertise to the police that you’re doing so.

That advice wasn’t followed in 2006’s In re T.H., in which a man was charged with unlawful possession of fireworks because he held them in plain view in the back of his SUV.

The police didn’t even need to search him or his vehicle to find them.

However, if you do happen to get threatened with a police search, it’s not a smart idea to invite the police to search the compartments of your car, just as the defendant did in U.S. v. Boden.

According to that case, Boden told a police officer who stopped him he had both a handgun and fireworks in his car, which led to a police searching for, and finding, the fireworks.

Police searches aren’t the only danger with illegal fireworks.

Getting very drunk and setting off commercial-grade fireworks at a party probably isn’t the safest thing in the world.

The plaintiff in 2004’s Pullen v. West, for example, was blinded in one eye, suffered nerve damage, memory loss, and required steel plates to be inserted in his head, because of his usage of illegal commercial fireworks.

His drinking 12-16 beers beforehand may have been a contributing factor, too.

Even giving away illegal fireworks can have some serious legal consequences.

Just look at Michigan Millers Mut. Ins. Co. v. Awad.

That case involved a man, Jason Jones, asking an acquaintance, Jason Awad (who ran an illegal fireworks stand), for some free fireworks.

Awad eventually gave Jones some illegal bottle rockets to get Jones to leave him alone.

Jones subsequently lit a bottle rocket from inside a car and let it go out the window.

The bottle rocket unexpectedly struck a woman in the eye as she was getting out of the other side of the vehicle, and she sued for damages.

While these cases involved some level of carelessness or stupidity, illegal fireworks are still illegal.

Everyone wants to be patriotic on the Fourth of July, but there’s nothing patriotic about injuring yourself or another, or ending up in jail.

That said, have a fun, safe, and legal incident-free holiday!

Everyone loves a good practical joke on April Fools’ Day.

The holiday has been celebrated in the Western world for over 600 years, and has led to a wide variety of pranks and, of course, misunderstandings.

Given its history, it would seem only natural that April Fools’ would find its way into the legal world.

And so it has in a variety of forms.

Some people simply take a joke too far, and then have to face the legal consequences.

In re G.W. deals with a denial of admission to the New Hampshire state bar.  The decision by the state supreme court found that the applicant failed the moral fitness test, in part, because of his explanation of a “reckless conduct” conviction.  The applicant’s explanation was that it was an April Fools’ joke in which the applicant “pretended to be a robber” at a convenience store.

In People v. Crittle, the defendant was convicted of intended armed robbery.  Probably intoxicated at the time, he held up a grocery store with a toy gun, and returned the money shortly after he received it from the cashier, saying it was just an April Fool’s joke. While the conviction was eventually overturned by the state supreme court, the joke probably wasn’t worth the trouble.

Of course, sometimes April Fools’ is used as an excuse for doing something that you later regret (or get caught for).

In State v. Hicks, the defendant claimed that he made a confession about his involvement in a robbery in order to play an April Fools’ joke on the police. And because he said that he was an alcoholic and believed that if he told them what they wanted to hear, they would let him go home where he could continue drinking.

A defendant in U.S. v. Marchant failed to convince federal prosecutors that he received child pornography only as an April Fools’ Day joke, as though it would have made a difference if that were true.

In Ford v. Institutional Division, an inmate assaulted several other inmates and attempted to escape, and later referred to the incident as “an innocent ‘April Fools’ Day Joke.’”

In rare cases, someone will use April Fools’ Day as an excuse to indulge in his more violent tendencies.

In State v. Stone, the defendant was convicted of intent to inflict serious injury because of his idea of an April Fools’ joke: he slashed the tires of a female acquaintance’s car and red spray-painted the front door.  After he did it, he called her and said “April Fools’, [expletive], I hope you enjoy your new tires.”

And there have certainly been many more April Fools’ cases that have gone under the radar.

The point here is that while everyone loves a good April Fools’ joke, the excuse seldom provides legal immunity to otherwise unlawful behavior.

Happy pranking!

The Citation

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I drafted cite and query,
Arguing many a fact and statement of a client whose court date lay in store,
While one-by-one KeyCite checking, each citation for good law,
Suddenly there came a tapping, tapping at my chamber door.
‘Tis my Westlaw rep,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door -
Thank goodness, with citations a solution for.’

Ah, West BriefTools I remember, adds KeyCite flags in the draft I render,
And adds to each a blue line under, linked to Westlaw for knowledge more.
Eagerly I looked it over; one red flag I saw, link followed,
Followed to the Westlaw document – where I saw the reason for -
That an overturned citation, and thanked my rep for saving me humiliation -
Now good law in my draft where red flag was before.

And the sales rep, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
Reminding me of West CiteAdvisor, formats and TOA to ensure;
And his eyes have all the seeming of an attorney’s that are gleaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
So my fingers click once the mouse, and there a TOA where none before;
The citation to be frightening – nevermore.

- Brought to you by the litigation solutions marketing team at Thomson Reuters

For those students, and for everyone else reading this, I’d like to offer a link to an essay that provided some much-needed comic relief for my classmates and me during my first semester of law school. The article was written in 1991, so some of the references (e.g., the discussion of LSAT scoring) are a little dated, but it is still good for several laughs. The article, written by James D. Gordon III and entitled “How Not to Succeed in Law School,” can be found at 100 YLJ 1679. It’s a cynically humorous take on the entire law school process, from taking the LSAT and choosing a school to graduation.

If you’d like to read more humorous law review articles, check the KeyCite Citing References for the aforementioned essay. One of the Citing References, “A Compendium of Clever and Amusing Law Review Writings,” true to its title, links to several clever and amusing articles.

Submitted by Todd D. West Reference Attorney
Submitted by
West Reference Attorneys

Some believe that the paperless office is not that far off. Vincent E. Giuliano of Arthur D. Little, Inc., figures that the use of paper in business for records and correspondence should be declining by 1980, “and by 1990, most record-handling will be electronic.”

Of course, it’s easy to poke fun at predictions that don’t quite hit the mark, but… Well, it’s been more than 35 years since this article came out, and we’re still waiting for our paperless offices, along with our jet packs and robot housemaids.

Why do our offices and cubicles still resemble mausoleums for dead trees? The copier and computer printer came along, of course – but so did tree-friendly technologies like the scanner, the office network, email and the Internet.

For a more complete answer, consider this familiar scenario: You’re rummaging through a case file, and you pull out an important document that you hadn’t noticed before. You make a copy and return the original to the Bankers Box you found it in. As you read your copy, you mark it up with your trusty highlighter and scrawl notes in the margins. Then you ask the secretary to make three more copies of your annotated version to place in various case folders and share with your team.

What just happened? In order to analyze and collaborate with your colleagues, you’ve turned one document into five – because aside from getting everyone together in a conference room, there’s no other way to do it.

Or is there? In fact, a new generation of online collaboration tools is changing the way legal teams work together, which is especially good news if you’re a tree. One example is West Case Notebook, which provides a central repository for sharing all of your case files, along with annotations and other information added by your team. Just think: Even though the paperless office may still be years away, your case files could be 99% pulp-free today.

The scenario above was adapted from this West Case Notebook Case Study, which tells the story of how Grodsky & Olecki, a small firm in Santa Monica, improved efficiency while reducing reliance on paper. You can see additional case studies, customer testimonials, videos and more at west.thomson.com/casenotebook.

Given how familiar Bankers Boxes are in the legal world, their moniker might seem a bit odd – until you hear their story.

The story goes back to 1917, when the Bankers Box Company was formed after a chance elevator meeting between two entrepreneurs. One of the men, Walter Nickel, made cardboard boxes and sold them to banks for record storage. Nickel had just been called up to serve in World War I and was looking for someone to buy his business.

The other man in the elevator, Harry Fellowes, was intrigued by Nickel’s enterprise. The 16th Amendment (the one that legalized the income tax) had taken effect a few years earlier, and Fellowes knew that the tax would soon be expanded to pay for the war effort. If more people were snared by the income tax, he reasoned, more boxes would be needed to store all those tax records.

By the time the elevator doors opened, Fellowes had struck a deal to purchase Nickel’s box-making business for $50, or about $830 in today’s coin. The company went on to diversify into all kinds of office products, and in 1983 the Bankers Box Company changed its name to Fellowes Manufacturing.

As sturdy and economical as Bankers Boxes are, they’ve also come to symbolize some of the most tedious work performed by legal professionals: Pulling file folders from a box, one by one, and sifting through hundreds of documents in search of that key piece of information that could cinch up a case.

Bankers Boxes will always be useful for document storage, but their days as case-file organizers are coming to an end, thanks to electronic case management tools like West Case Notebook. And as anyone who’s ever hauled a 25-pound file box into a courtroom can attest, that’s a good thing.

West Case Notebook makes it easy for legal teams to organize and collaborate on case files electronically. Find out how Forman & Cardonsky, a small firm in Elizabeth, New Jersey, freed its attorneys from the file box ball-and-chain in this West Case Notebook Case Study. And you can see other case studies, customer testimonials, videos and more at west.thomson.com/casenotebook.

Imagine a marked-up legal document in a world without highlighters. What do you see? Pages layered with hand-drawn lines, circles, boxes, brackets and squiggles?

Fortunately, that horrifying, ink-smeared alternate universe was averted with the invention of the highlighter in 1963. Avery came up with the original Hi-Liter, and they wowed us again in 1978 by mixing phosphors into the ink to create those “glowing” colors. The first fluorescent shade was yellow, and it’s still the most common highlighter color used today.

As cool as neon highlighters are, they may be going the way of carbon paper and correction fluid, since legal documents are increasingly printed only in final form – or never printed at all. But the practice of highlighting text may live on forever; digital highlighting is one of the most popular features in Word, WordPerfect, and now West Case Notebook, which lets you highlight information in electronic case files.

West Case Notebook makes it easy for legal teams to organize and collaborate on case files electronically – multi-color highlighting included. Find out how the Baltimore law firm Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dann uses these features to save time and money in this West Case Notebook Case Study. And you can see other case studies, customer testimonials, videos and more at west.thomson.com/casenotebook.

If the mark of a good prank is the number of intelligent people it can fool, then these three semi-famous April Fools jokes involving lawyers and lawmakers clearly made the grade.

Senate Bill Bans Web Surfing While Intoxicated

Back in 1994, an op-ed piece in the April issue of PC Computing magazine ridiculed an imagined Senate bill that would prohibit “drunk driving” on the “Information Highway.”

“The moniker – Information Highway – itself seems to be responsible for SB #040194,” the magazine reported. “Introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, it’s designed to prohibit anyone from using a public computer network (Information Highway) while the computer user is intoxicated. I know how silly this sounds, but Congress apparently thinks that being drunk on a highway is bad no matter what kind of highway it is. The bill is expected to pass this month.”

The article’s author, John Dvorak, later said that the spoof caught  the attention of the Washington Post – and a few U.S. senators (including Ted Kennedy, one of the purported sponsors of the bill), who received a flurry of angry phone calls in response to the article.

Sadly, the original article can’t be found on the Internet, but you can read the text here, attached to a letter about the article from a Kennedy staff member. (Scroll down to see the article text.)

Alabama Legislature Changes the Value of Pi

In another April Fools hoax involving lawmakers run amok, a bogus AP news article reported that the Alabama legislature passed a bill that redefined pi from its previously assumed value – “3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate” – rounding it down to an even 3.

According to the story, the bill’s sponsor had “called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact answer could harm students’ self-esteem.”

The fake news report was published in the April 1998 edition of an obscure newsletter by New Mexicans for Science and Reason (you can read it here), but it soon was circulating all over the world, thanks to a relatively new phenomenon: mass email forwarding.

Colorado Supremes Issue Dress Code for Attorneys

The Denver Bar Association showed its humorous side with an April 2001 newsletter article about an unusual Colorado Supreme Court decision that compelled the state’s attorneys to wear uniforms in court.

And not just any old uniforms. “Based on the recommendations of fashion consultants and parochial school principals, the Court will now require all lawyers, female and male, to wear a blue blazer with the Colorado State Seal on the pocket,” the article said. “Men will wear tan slacks in summer and gray flannel in winter. Women barristers must wear plaid skirts year round. Women are also expected to wear white bobby sox, and men are prohibited from donning any shoes with tassels.”

The Court reportedly acted out of concern over casual attire in the state’s courtrooms. “Confusion grew as each law firm established a different dress code, with names such as ‘business casual,’ ‘corporate casual,’ ‘up casual,’ ‘dot.com casual’ and ‘downscale but still lawyerly casual,’” the article explained.

Apparently, the spoof was believable enough for several fashion-conscious attorneys to call the bar association for clarification. (The original article lives on at the Denver Bar Association website – and it’s still a fun read.)

The Jewish saying at the top of this post can be found in Uncle Anthony’s Unabridged Analogies: Quotes & Proverbs for Lawyers and Lecturers, which is available at a 10% discount to Westlaw Insider readers. (And that’s no joke!)