This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays, we look at some funny legal cases that will take your mind off the lockdowns, pandemics, and social distancing messaging. I mean, if anything is going to make you want to stay inside, it’s knowing that going outside means potentially encountering some of these people!
Follow the jump for some much-needed comic relief.
Robocop
Some genius in California decided that all human jobs are easily replaced by machines. And this resulted in a hilarious, but also scary, experience for one woman in a California park.
Apparently, the parks in Huntingdon Park, California are patrolled by police robots. Park users can push a button on the robot to report a crime and summon the police. That is, if the robot accepts the call. In this case, the woman who was the victim of an attack in the park, pressed the button. The robot did not accept her report. Instead, it kept telling the woman to step aside, and played a funny little tune.
What gave the police department the idea that a robot programmed to play a song could prevent crime in the park anyway? Some jobs should just be done by humans.
A Crabby Defence
It’s not often that we get a weird and wacky legal case a little closer to home. But this case was just too good to pass up.
After being arrested in a human smuggling investigation, a Canadian man was checked for fingerprints. When police tried to run his prints, despite having knowledge that he was in Canadian fingerprint databases, they found nothing. Upon closer inspection, his prints were physically altered to the point that they were untraceable.
Sounds suspicious right?
Well, so was the explanation the man offered to police for why his fingerprints had been mangled. Allegedly, the detainee told police that years of eating shellfish had altered his fingerprints beyond recognition.
Yeah… that makes sense.
Worst Legal Filing of All Time
As a woman in the field of law, I’ve seen some crazy statements made about women. They’ve been made in court, they’ve been made to me privately, and they’ve been made publicly in the streets. But generally, most men are smart enough to keep their misogyny to themselves.
Not lawyer Seyfarth Shaw, apparently.
In dealing with a lawsuit about the pay gap in professional US soccer, Mr. Shaw filed a statement of defence on behalf of the US Soccer Association. In it, Mr. Shaw claimed that women had to be paid less to play soccer because they get pregnant, because they are slower and less strong than men, and because men’s soccer fans are rowdier, so the men have to work harder to impress them.
So that’s pretty darn stupid.
The result of filing this was that the President of the US Soccer Association had to quit in shame, following the backlash. So yeah, worst legal filing of all time? Probably.
