Judicial Follies

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Was this guy Hitler in a previous life?

Dwayne Dail served half his life, 18 years, in a North Carolina prison for a rape he didn’t commit. Given that his childhood sweetheart was pregnant at the time, he ended up spending his son’s entire life so far in jail; the boy grew up without him. Free for three months now and awarded what seems to the casual observer a paltry $360,000 for what he rightly calls not wrongful incarceration but ‘kidnapping’, this unlucky guy is back in court. For what, you ask? His baby mother is suing him for the back child support he never paid while imprisoned and while she raised their son alone. Said Dail, “Everybody wonders why I’m not mad. Well, I’m mad now.”

Again, bad cases make bad law but there is a real issue here: should settlements such as these be considered income? The judge is still pondering this doozy of a case.

Only the mother knows why she filed this suit without first asking Dail for a chunk; her son, now just getting to know his dad, reports being traumatized by all this. First his dad was a pedophile rapist (the victim was 12). Now he’s not. He’s out of prison, they’ve just met, and the mother he loves has Dad back in the place he fears most, a court room.

You gotta read to believe.

In New York, the first woman to be exonerated for murder, based on DNA evidence, has been released from prison after serving 13 years for killing her 13 year old daughter. She can muse on that ironic symbolism while they retry her for second degree manslaughter. And while the scumbag boyfriend and likely murderer enjoys the immunity he got for testifying against her. Man, that must keep him warm while the murder charge he just caught from a 1993 killing winds its merry way through the courts.

Since we’re on the subject of judges, laws and court rooms, here’s another one to make us citizens dread venturing into the halls of justice. A Niagara Falls judge went insane over a ringing cell phone in his court room. When no one would fess up to owning it, he turned his court room into a POW camp. The biggest surprise is that something was actually done about it; two years laters, he’s looking for a new job while he works on his appeal.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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