Lawyers, What's The Worst Defense You've Ever Heard In Court? (r/AskReddit | Reddit Stories)

lawyers of Reddit what's the most ridiculous argument you've heard in court former assistant state attorney prosecutor this defendant is called up for arraignment and the judges telling them that he's been charged with theft for stealing a roll of scratch-off tickets from a gas station the judge informs the defendant that since the value of the tickets was over $300 therefore it's of felony rather than a misdemeanor the defendant says to the judge that your honor to be fair the tickets were all losers implying it's not theft at all I was amazed at the ingenious nurse yet futility of the argument ha I'm a lawyer I should win right there anyway we were in trial and opposing counsel was objecting to a document I was trying to enter into evidence through one of their witnesses the witness had identified it as one of their business records but opposing counsel objects jury is in the courtroom so the judge has asked approach we do and opposing counsel argues the authenticity of the document I was a little surprised so my response was Your Honor this is their exhibit his counsel stating they submitted inauthentic documents to this court judge turns to counsel are you submitting non authentic documents posing counsel stammers out and no in the document go there I was a little surprised they wanted to argue their own document wasn't authentic just to keep me from getting it to the jury I am a lawyer the state tried to argue that probable cause exists simply because there is a police report alleging the crime from the fact that a police officer filed this report it is a reasonable inference at the crime took place as described double-quote good allegations are self-proving now well wrap up Cortland I guess no need to hear any more motions to dismiss ever I wonder why no other prosecutor in 240 years of jurisprudence ever thought of that before 25 year old assistant district attorney who went to the worst law school in this state made a left turn on a green turn arrow a city bus ran a red and t-boned me my car was a little VW Rabbit sir just scooted me and I was perfectly fine driver pulls over comes out and says the Sun was in my eyes I say I'm not hurt thanks for asking police arrived and guess what there was a literal barse load full of witnesses everyone had the same story she ran a red city paid for my car etc she denied wrongdoing and went to court which I had to attend along with a witness or two and the officer her defense she had a migraine judge so I should let you off the hook because you had a bad headache and was driving into the Sun driver yes Your Honor I'm glad you understand she got her commercial vehicle license revoked should have just taken the points traffic court speeding ticket Your Honor I didn't speed and I can prove it with logic double-quote judge a ki I double quote lady a drive a Prius double quote judge question mark double quote lady that proves I'm responsible specifically in the realm of cars so I obviously wouldn't speed double quote she had to pay the ticket she should have argued the Prius lacks enough power to speed even if one wanted to I have a family member who used that defense once they clocked him going like 80 or something but a sh TTY truck can't physically go that fast I have a brief encounter personal injury prospect old ladies Lipton fell on an icy driveway which was not sorted or maintained so she wanted to sue for damages after hearing the story turns out the lady fell on her own driveway which she did not saw maintained she was wanting to sue herself not so much ridiculous as ghastly but a man accused of up in his own daughter saying he couldn't have done so because he had a 9-inch C CK and it would have caused her damage and that the physical signs of vessel activity that she did exhibit were because she'd been screwing the family dog I don't do criminal law anymore that was enough for me edit lots of people asking what happened should probably have put that sin here originally I left the firm by the time it actually got to trial but was kept in the loop about the case by friends still there he was found guilty and went off to prison law student former professor story defendant busted for possession of narcotics they were in the pocket of his leather jacket he argues the search was illegal because with his buttery smooth leather jacket there's no way the officer would have felt FedEx in his pocket during a pat-down so he shouldn't have reached in the pocket of fine FedEx in the first place judge asks if the jacket is the one he was currently wearing in court it was judge asks to feel this jacket in the pockets defendant hands it to the bailiff judge finds more addicts in the pocket needless to say it didn't go well for him I am a lawyer had a female inmates claim she was molested by one of the guards one of her most damning pieces of testimony was testifying to this large vertical scar he had on his chest from the heart operation she continued to say that she remembered this huge scar from when he molested her the guard got on the stand took his shirt off and he had a tan iiiii horizontal scar up on his shoulder case over he had apparently told her one time that he had surgery and she assumed that would have left his giant scar and used that to make up a story not a lawyer bit was the child in a custody case between my parents my mother's lawyer argued for and had put in the final agreement that I had to add my mother as a facebook friend and also a child of divorced parents the stupidity knows no bounds buckle up man and remember that they aren't you deal you and let them do what is right for them this never made it to court I asked my divorce lawyer what was the worst thing a client had asked him to argue I was expecting I want the salad spinner sort of story he had a client professor in his 70s who was divorcing from his wife also a professor in her 70s they were both Jewish his wife had a tattoo on her arm it was a number put there by the Nazis when they put her in a concentration camp in World War two as a child husband was born in the US was not German the German government was in the process of settling a case with the survivors she had some amount of money a six-figure sum due to her the husband wanted his lawyer to argue that he should get half the settlement money lawyer told him that there was a special circle in hell for lawyers who asked for stuff like that in that he was not planning on ending up there also a lawyer had opposing counsel try to argue that because in Langley they had written on her addiction notice it has been a pleasure getting to know you but please leave but Ann testified they were all full tenants that she hated that she was dishonest and nothing she said could be trusted opened a question of dishonesty wide open although landlady wasn't an angel tenants had an enormous string of fraud priors we could tell the court about as a result prosecutor here had a case where a man are paid his six-year-old daughter because she wore suggestive clothing and seemed to be asking for it he tried to argue about you know girls are just as sewer lyac t'v at a younger age now double quote I remember thinking what would Dexter do anyway man got convicted and is now serving two life sentences plus 100 edit the reason for that sentence is that he will not be eligible for parole he was convicted of two counts of RP two counts of incest and two counts of aggravated child molestation in my jurisdiction you are eligible for parole on a life sentence after 30 years life and life without parole are two different sentences here he was not eligible for life without parole so in theory at least yes he could serve two consecutive life sentences which would be 60 years and then parole now however we are certain he never draws another breath as a free man I've done several of these cases and to me they're much harder than murder cases because of the pressure in this case the man had no other complaints than this as a father so if I lost the poor girl goes back to rapists dad not a lawyer but when my mom was killed by a drunk driver we were filing a wrongful death suit and the lawyer for the defense used my mom's cancer to say that she was going to die anyway so a wrongful death dispensation was not owed geez that's like a court case where the mom of a kid who murdered an old man said the man was old anyways and he was probably gonna die soon this caused a fistfight out in the hallway between the two families sorry about your mom that lawyer was an [ __ ] and a lawyer but this happened a little prior to me starting my current job so this his secondhand a friend of mine is an author and last year prosecuted several chiropractors for insurance fraud turns out they were sovereign citizen types who insisted on representing themselves one point a defendant got up to the lectern and started lecturing the federal judge that because there was fringe on the flag in the courtroom the court was an admiralty caught lacking jurisdiction over him bizarre later pled out in all our serving time as with everyone else in this thread I am NOT a lawyer but did work in court had multiple mothers and separate cases claim that they couldn't be sent to prison because it breached their European Union right to a family life I can only assume they got it from something like the Daily Mail because they all used that same phrasing edit yes this was at least in the UK not a lawyer cause they don't exist I got a ticket for expired parking meter went in uncontested it the guy says the parking authority took some pictures for evidence how do you explain these the pictures included my car my license plate and the parking meter which clearly showed 13 minutes left on it wasn't the other lawyer but his client took the stand in a retail theft trial claimed he didn't steal a couple salmon fillies on purpose he was just so flustered by a phone conversation with his girlfriend that he accidentally slipped them into the pockets of his jacket in a part of the store the loss prevention officer called shoplifter Ally because it's a blind spot for the cameras and walked out without realizing it it's not like it was a candy bar or something small it was two salmon filets I asked him have you ever done that before him no me have you ever seen anyone anywhere ever put fish like that in their pockets in your entire life him dot no double quote mercifully the jury did not buy his ludicrous story and found him guilty my uncle did malpractice defense while one year he had to defend a surgeon the patient said after his elbow surgery he couldn't play tennis anymore they went through weeks of work trying to figure out what went wrong and why all the sudden this guy couldn't play tennis because according to all the evidence the surgery went fine and he should be good then right before a recess my uncle stopped and asked sir have you ever played tennis before the guy said well no but I've always wanted to the case got dismissed I was a juror but this was a hell of a defense defendant ran through a red light and crossed against traffic in front of an officer she was over twice the limit it wasn't her fault she had a cut on her arm that her dog licked the yeast from the dog's saliva entered her bloodstream and converted her blood sugar into alcohol I wasn't a lawyer but a law clerk working with the prosecutor's office this guy was caught on the highest quality security cam video I've ever seen stabbing a store clerk like 15 times she survived and then was tackled a block away from the scene not five minutes later by man who had seen him flee and followed him 25 feet from the knife and the jacket he'd been wearing that was covered in blood with a receipt with his name on it in the pocket it was a literal definition of a slam-dunk case the guy chose to proceed to trial without his lawyer instead of having the case postponed after his attorney his house was broken into and all his files of a stolen this guy's his main argument was that it wasn't him because in the statement of probable cause written by the officers after the incident they misspelled his highly unique last name by adding a T in the middle he G Johnson became Johnston he spelled his name out at every opportunity with much emphasis he also argued it couldn't be him because of the man on the video tied a t-shirt around his head so that the distinctive tattoos there would be hidden but he would never cover over his tattoos like that because he was proud of them and they represented his heritage as a Korean man the jury took less than a half hour to return a guilty verdict as a corporate lawyer the most ridiculous argument I come across almost monthly is as follows fortune 500 company signs a garbage contract and is going to lose a lot of money due to the plain language of that contract fortune 500 company argues unconscionability specifically that said company was not sophisticated enough to read the contract and no reasonable person would ever agree to the terminal terms in dispute in some multi-billion dollar firms claiming they're incapable of reading contracts I am a lawyer colleague argued that it wasn't animal cruelty to shoot a dog because the dog didn't suffer this wasn't like a euthanasia situation rather a robbery gone bad the judge entertained it for a second and then came to her senses of course I'm not a lawyer was doing my journalism degree and was just watching cases all day for an assignment one guy was up on dead charges for distribution he was selling weed his lawyer tried to argue to the judge that we'd never hurt anyone and it even made it easier for police during domestic disturbance calls and that in fact the police should be using his clients to get weed to calm people down his clients got something like three years in jail and five years probation car accident case where the plaintiff was clearly trying to ham it up for friends and family for backup and the stories were all inconsistent cried on the stand it was a small accident and the plaintiff wanted a lot of money for sprains the attorney said you ever are in consistencies and crazy stories but you don't believe the person who tells you the same thing every time that is the person pulling the wool over your eyes um no most people are consistent the attorney also had his client testify that snow interpreters were used when they were on that there was confusion about a question regarding a prior accident when that question was never asked not a lawyer but my uncle is he had to defend a man accused of these she ality with a horse defense was that his D CK was too small to actually achieve climax in the horses Amos Peugeot he didn't actually have SX with it but I mean he was giving it with washing up liquid and even had a little stool to stand on when he was ready to go at it so the defense didn't really work in his favor neither did the CCTV footage you

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Id: TY3jIHWjbCA

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019