Better than Court TV: Sensational Cases from the NYC Courts

For those deprived readers who haven't read my latest column at Mad Hatters' Review, here it is.



Better Than Court TV: Sensational Cases from the NYC Courts
by Carol Novack

NYC COP ON STAND BLAMES COHEN OPTICALS FOR MISTAKING 12 YEAR-OLD BLACK KID FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN.

6/22/2007 6:54 PM EST
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK (Rooters)

Anonymous jurors sat impassively while the defendant, Officer Robert Reilly Johnson, testified about his trip to Cohen Opticals a few hours before he fatally shot Ishmaeli something or other we can't pronounce on a rooftop in Bensonhurst. According to Alphonse Derschovitz (bigimportantlawyerblog), this is the first instance in America that the defense of “Myopia Nervosa Cornea,” a.k.a. “Negligent Optical Illusions,” or rarer, “Negligent Optical Retailers,” has been permitted to proceed to trial. “On every other occasion, well, really only one," Dershovitz is alleged to have said to his former student Gertrude Klotz (an intern with Fox News, and a gad about town at MySpace), "the courts have refused to consider the affirmative defense, which is widely recognized in Ubetzuasshcanstand and other parts of the former USSR nobody here has heard of except Borak, but then of course, he's not from here.”

Tensions were ascending when the defendant took the stand, as nobody thought he'd get up and swear. On direct examination, Johnson testified: "The sun was laying down on the roof like this glaring monster alien egg yolk. I couldn't see with those dang new glasses. … I swear this kid, with these huge sunglasses, looked just like that Osama guy, and when he did something with his left hand, I did like any good American, like they teach us to shoot before we gets shot at. It's what you do when you're an officer of the law and you love your country and you're faced with an Arab looking guy you have reason to believe is a terrorist. God bless America."

Judge Weezel admonished an elderly male juror, known as "the knitter," for giggling "inappropriately" when Johnson blessed America.

At the close of today’s proceedings, the defendant's mother, Gertrude Kvetzchinitz Johnson, of somewhere around Nashville, Tennessee, stated: “He was always a quiet boy, a bit slow, to tell the truth. It took him at least 15 minutes to pull the feelers out of the ugly creeping critters around these parts. It was hard to get him in to supper ’cause he took so long. And he was kinda quiet too, and a bit messy, drooling all over the cats and them babies and all and it were kinda strange how those babies and all would plum disappear and he was always eating crickets without gravy. But BobBoy was always a good boy and quiet. We were mighty right proud when he became a policeman in that awful city.”

Stay in tune tomorrow when the Kings County District Attorney Amanda Poccolocco —still under investigation for fraud and bribery — is scheduled to make a rare appearance to cross-examine the defendant. According to her ex-husband, real estate mogul Horace H. Houghton, Ms. Poccolocco has never cross-examined anyone but him, and that was during his alleged affair with the infamous Madame Beatrice. Houghton alleges that his ex-wife did a “pathetic job.”

The outcome of this case may well make waves in the legal field if the defendant is acquitted and the action holds up on appeal, post-appeal, post-post appeal, and certiorari, although legal scholars unanimously agree that the optical defense would hit a fatal blindspot if it were to proceed to consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court, as a majority of the justices believe that “defenses are not rights that are protected by the Constitution, as if defendants had any rights to begin with.” Flugmire v. U.S., 1463 U.S. 2777 (2007) (Scalia, J).