xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Pennsylvania’s attorney general and prosecutors in Arapahoe County, Colo., made similar interpretations of child pornography laws recently in defending their decisions not to reveal information. The attorney general said he could not publicly identify Web sites he had ordered suppressed by Internet service providers because, to identify those sites would be “disseminating” child pornography.
Colorado prosecutors refused to show defendant Joseph Verbrugge the 200 photographs it would use against him (as is required in all criminal cases) because to do so would be to disseminate child pornography to him. (In January, a Colorado appeals court rebuked the prosecutors.)
Convicted killer Roderick Ferrell, 23, asked for a new trial in March, telling a judge in Tavares, Fla., that he had an inadequate defense at his 1996 murder trial. Ferrell had admitted then that he was the leader of a teenaged, goth-outfitted “vampire clan” that often cut their arms open to suck each other’s blood and which murdered the parents of one of its members. Ferrell told the judge this time that he had been seeing a psychiatrist in 1996, whereupon the judge asked who had originally told him he needed help; Ferrell replied, “The school, the sheriff’s office, my mom. Basically the whole city.”
Cat-hoarder Heidi Erickson, 42, had two Boston-area homes raided in April and May, at which authorities rescued a total of 112 sickly cats and found several cat carcasses. Erickson is one of the more aggressive hoarders on record, both for her proclivity for litigiousness (40 cases in seven years) and the circus-like atmosphere she created at a subsequent court hearing (during which she denied the accounts of numerous witnesses that the cats were ailing). She told one person her mission was to breed the “imperfections” out of Persians. Erickson said she was a victim of discrimination (epileptic disability, sexual lifestyle) and would challenge any eviction or any restrictions by authorities in Beacon Hill and Watertown, Mass.
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Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD