Read on to find out more about this week’s weirdest and wackiest legal stories from around the globe!
A woman in Brazil was standing outside her apartment when a man came up an asked her the time. When she took her cell phone out to check the time and tell him, rather than say thank you and walk off like a normal person, he told her that he was armed and demanded that she hand over her phone. Well, most people would probably just hand over the phone and hope that is the end of it. But not this woman.
This foolish man had decided to rob a UFC fighter, Polyana Viana. She landed two punches and a kick to his head, before tackling him to the ground and pinning him until the police arrived. Clearly, he got more than he bargained for.
Now, while her actions are being celebrated it is also important to bear in mind that the law of self defence, or defence of property requires your response to be reasonable to the harm you perceive will happen. So it is probably not a good idea to punch, kick, and tackle any would-be mugger lest you find yourself facing assault charges.
A common feature in this series is the overreaction of individuals to their roommates or family members eating their food. Generally, these end in violent assaults or murder. And while those are wacky enough in themselves to warrant feature in this series, this particular yogurt case really takes the cake.
A Taiwanese woman came home one day to discover that one of her packages of yogurt had been eaten, and discarded in the trash. At first, she confronted her roommates with the discarded yogurt container and each of her housemates denied committing the foul deed. So she did what any reasonable, law-respecting person would do. She marched down to the local police station and raised enough of a stint that they opened an investigation.
Yes, folks, the police in Taiwan used resources to investigate the alleged theft of a two-dollar bottle of yogurt.
Oh, but it gets better. The police attempted to dust the bottle for fingerprints, but to no avail. So they did the next logical step in a very serious police investigation: ordered a DNA test. And the five roommates who were accused of the crime were required to attend at the police station to provide their DNA samples.
The pilferer was identified after the genetic test came back with a match to one of the roommates. And, to make things even more ridiculous in this case, the prosecution is now pursuing charges of theft.
Moral of the story? Don’t mess with yogurt in Taiwan. They take that shit seriously.
If yogurt can lead to an expensive police investigation and a genetic test in Taiwan, the type of nonsense that happens in Arlington, Virginia over a slice of cheesecake is also enough to raise a few eyebrows.
As part of its 40th birthday promotion, Cheesecake Factory was giving out 40,000 free slices of cheesecake. They were doing this in partnership with DoorDash, so that people had to order the cheesecake online. But delivery fees, order minimums, and taxes were all waived. So the cheesecake was truly, truly free. This sparked thousands of online orders and ultimately chaos at the Factory.
A dispute over parking, wait times, and swearing at Cheesecake Factory employees turned into the arrest of at least one individual at the restaurant for refusing to leave when ordered to do so by police. To add insult to injury, when the arrest was made he struggled with police garnering himself a second charge of resisting arrest.
