weird and wacky wednesdays

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 404

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Anything You Can Sit On

People assume a DUI requires a car. A real car, with four wheels, a steering wheel, and a stereo loud enough to annoy the neighbours. After years of working on impaired driving files, I can tell you the law has a much bigger imagination than that. The word that does the heavy lifting is not “car.” It is “operate.” And once you understand how broadly that word gets read, you start to look at the lawn equipment in your shed a little differently.

The stories this week are all variations on one theme. Each one features a person who got behind the controls of something that was never meant to leave the driveway, or the pasture, and discovered that the police did not find the choice of vehicle nearly as funny as the internet did. The machines keep getting stranger. The charges keep getting laid anyway.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 404Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 404 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 403

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: When the Lawyer Is Fake

People put an enormous amount of trust in their lawyer. They hand over their money, their secrets, and quite often the most frightening problem of their entire life. They assume that the person on the other side of the desk actually went to law school, actually passed the bar, and actually has a licence in good standing. Most of the time that assumption is correct. Every so often it is wrong.

This week I went looking for the people who pretended. I’m not so much interested in lawyers who made mistakes or lawyers who got suspended for the usual reasons. I mean people who were never entitled to practise at all, or who lost the right years ago and simply kept going. The stories come from three different places and they share one common thread. Somebody decided that a law degree, a bar exam, and a licence were optional, and a lot of trusting people paid the price. One of them even built a courtroom!

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 403Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 403 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 402

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: In and Out

I have a confession to make. I love a good heist movie. The planning montage, the impossible vault, the crew of specialists who each have one very specific skill, the clean getaway set to a jazzy soundtrack. As a criminal lawyer I probably should not admit that I find any of it charming, but there it is.

What the movies never show you is the scene that comes after the getaway. That is the scene where somebody has to actually sell a priceless painting that the entire planet is now looking for. It does not make the final cut, and that is a shame, because it is the most realistic part of the whole story. The getting is fast and dramatic. The keeping is slow and miserable, and it is usually where the wheels come off.

Every story this week has the same shape. Each one was over in a matter of minutes, sometimes in under a minute. The thieves were quick, organized, and gone before anyone could lay a hand on them. And in almost every case, the speed was the easy part. The hard part, the part that tends to end with someone sitting across a table from a lawyer, is everything that happens next.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 402Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 402 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 401

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: No Car Required

People tend to think impaired driving is something that only happens behind the wheel of a car. It is one of the most common misconceptions I run into. The Criminal Code does not use the word car. It uses the word conveyance, and it defines a conveyance as a motor vehicle, a vessel, an aircraft, or railway equipment. That is a very wide net. If it carries you from one place to another, the impaired driving laws are almost certainly paying attention.

I tell clients this all the time and they rarely believe me until they meet someone it happened to. So this week I went looking for the people it happened to. All three of the main stories come from Ontario, all three charges were laid by the OPP, and not one of them involves a car. What they share is a person who climbed onto something conveyance after a few too many and learned that the law does not care how many wheels you have. Or whether you have any wheels at all.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 401Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 401 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 400

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: The Best Way to Get Caught

Four hundred Wednesdays. That is what we are looking at this week. We are celebrating four hundred posts of lawyers behaving badly, defendants behaving worse, creative and stupid lawsuits, and police forces around the world coming up with new ways to embarrass themselves and others. It is fair to say that the supply of weird  and wacky legal news has not run dry, and there is no sign that it ever will.

For Volume 400 I wanted a theme that captures the spirit of this column. Our three stories this week meet the bill. Each one involves someone the police were trying to find. And each one is a study in how, no matter how creative the escape plan, the people doing the escaping tend to be their own biggest problem.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 400 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 399

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Advertising the Crime

Some defendants make the prosecutor’s job almost too easy. They post the evidence. They wear the evidence. They drive around with the evidence stuck to the back of the car. Every so often they go further and explain the whole thing directly to the officer at the side of the road. This week’s stories come from Buffalo, suburban Kansas City, and a small town in Wales. They do not have much in common except for one detail. In each of these cases, the defendant made an unforced contribution to the file.

I tell people all the time that the right to remain silent exists for a reason. It is not just something they say on American police shows. It is a real Canadian constitutional protection, and the smarter end of my client list takes it seriously. The people in this week’s stories did not get the memo.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 399Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 399 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 396

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: The Strange Cargo Edition

Every so often the news cycle delivers a run of stories that all seem to circle the same idea, and this past month gave us a good one. The theme is cargo. Specifically, the kind of cargo people are not supposed to be moving, on the kind of conveyance they probably should not be using to move it. We have a horse, a deceased alligator, and 22 Buddhist monks with 242 pounds of explanation to do at customs. None of these people were thinking about Canadian law when they did what they did, but each story is a useful reminder of how Canadian law would have treated them if they had tried any of this here.

Let’s start with the horse.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 396Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 396 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 394

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: The Rise of the Courtroom Robots

The legal system is currently facing the AI technology transformation. Artificial intelligence is on the way to being a common tool in the courtroom. Lawyers and witnesses are finding new ways to use these tools in the hopes of gaining an advantage. However, these attempts often lead to obvious failures that highlight the gap between human judgment and a mere robot. The stories this week serve as a warning that the justice system relies on truth and transparency rather than clever shortcuts. And what might seem like a potential advantage can turn into a spectacular disadvantage. 

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 394Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 394 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 393

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Updates in the world of legal advertising

This week for Weird and Wacky Wednesday, we are back to considering legal advertising. There are significant rules around legal advertising. If you go back fifty years, legal advertising was more or less forbidden, but because of court challenges, lawyers can now advertise. There are very specific rules and of course lawyers are great at finding loopholes. Constraint can provide the soil for significant creativity. The creativity of lawyers makes legal advertising always an interesting subject.

Like realtors, lawyers often end up on billboards or have their image plastered on the back of a bus. For years my colleague, Paul Doroshenko, was pictured on billboards around BC. A few years back I had my image on the back of buses in the Lower Mainland and on posters in bus shelters. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Drivers got to look at my face while being stuck in traffic. Every so often, someone tries something slightly different and it turns into a fight.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 393Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 393 Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 391

This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: The “Special Delivery” Edition

Welcome to another instalment of Weird and Wacky Wednesdays. In the legal world, we often talk about the “chain of custody” for evidence. Usually, that involves police carefully bagging items at a crime scene. This week, however, we have one defendant who skipped the middleman, bringing the evidence directly to the station. Then we have the weird corn hole guy case and a case where the officer hitched a ride on the hood of a stranger’s car.

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Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 391Read More »

Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 391 Read More »

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