xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
The Utah Supreme Court upheld the right of an atheist to pray aloud at a city council meeting ( the prayer of choice: “to be delivered from “weak and stupid politicians”), since the council always opens with a public prayer (Murray, Utah).
At a recent oral argument at the Missouri Supreme Court (reported in The New York Times in February), in response to a hypothetical question as to whether a death row inmate who had a thoroughly proper trial should nonetheless be executed even if there were new (but inadmissible) evidence of his innocence, the state’s assistant attorney general answered, “That’s correct, your honor.”
An Associated Press report on convicted Nebraska murderer Carolyn Joy is the latest case to frame the debate over who deserves organ transplants; Joy was conditionally approved in February to join the 117,300 people nationwide waiting for a liver, raising again the possibility that a more socially productive or well-behaved person will not get one in time if Joy is medically judged more needy.
In Penn Hills, Pa., in March, a 42-year-old man was attempting to tighten screws on his granddaughter’s crib using a knife, despite his wife’s admonition that he use the more appropriate Allen wrench. The next thing his wife knew, according to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was running to her, bleeding at the throat and screaming, “Call the paramedics! I fell on the knife!” The man died of his wound at a hospital shortly afterward. The wife (who had assembled the crib and asked her husband only to tighten the screws) later said she could not even imagine how he could have fallen on the knife.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD
