From the infamous Jaffa Cake legal battle to the more unusual story of a citizen’s arrest by Batman in Bradford, bizarre legal cases make the headlines on a weekly basis.

Those considering taking a job as a lawyer will inevitably be faced with strange legal cases. Over the years, there have been some incredible cases, including a man seeking $54 million in compensation after a dry cleaning company lost his trousers and a fabricated feud between QCs over baked goods.

Here are a few of Law Absolute’s most memorable and bizarre legal cases throughout history.

Nix v. Hedden – Is the tomato a fruit or vegetable?

In 1893, the Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is a vegetable. The whole situation came about during a case between the Nix family, one of the largest sellers of produce in New York City, and Edward Hedden, a collector at the Port of New York. The Nix family sued Hedden to recover fees they had spent on transporting the tomatoes, because legislation at the time stated tax must be paid on imported vegetables, but not fruit. Allegedly during the trial, both sides put forward definitions of fruit and vegetables to argue their cases. Botanically, any seed-bearing structure formed from a flowering plant, is a fruit. The court unanimously decided that the scientific classification doesn’t change common language, and that a tomato is a vegetable because the public generally think of it as one.

Batman’s good deed

When Yorkshireman Stan Worby walked into Bradford Police Station dressed as Batman with an apprehended suspect in tow, it was assumed he was completing a citizen’s arrest. This is often a grey-area that puts self-appointed deputies at risk of civil liability. A few things needed to be cleared up. Did he have probable ground to apprehend this man? How did he find himself in this situation? Depending on the circumstances, Batman could have found himself being charged with kidnapping or assault. But, as it turns out, Stan Worby (Batman) and the suspect were friends and were both charged with burglary after police stopped a vehicle with suspected stolen goods.

Jaffa Cake – Cake or biscuit?

In 1991, during a case to evaluate whether VAT is payable, the court had to decide whether Jaffa Cakes were in fact cakes or biscuits. In the UK, VAT is payable on chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on chocolate-covered cakes. Jaffa Cakes manufacturer McVities defended its classification of Jaffa Cakes as cakes at a tribunal after it was suggested Jaffa Cakes were biscuits due to their shape and size, and were often eaten in place of biscuits. To prove its point, McVities created a giant Jaffa Cake. The court found that the Jaffa Cake is a cake.

Causing a splash 

In 2014, a 22-year-old driver faced a court summons and a £5,000 fine for driving through a puddle and splashing a mother and her two children in Essex. It was reported in The Telegraph that the two children were left soaked in dirty water and Debbie Pugh, their mother, claims the driver drove deliberately through the puddle at high speed. Little did the driver know that there was a police car behind him and officers saw the situation unfold. He was reported for driving under violation of Section 3 of the Road Traffic Act, on grounds of driving without reasonable consideration.

Bakery fued

Two QCs took a Dublin newspaper to court in 1987 after it falsified a story about the two fighting in a bakery. The Sunday World claimed Desmond Boal and Robert McCartney visited a bakery and, upon realising there were not enough chocolate eclairs for the two of them, proceeded to argue over who saw them first. The paper admitted the story was fabricated and the matter went to court. From the witness box, the journalist responsible for the story stated they “thought it was true at the time” and it was only a “trivial humorous item”. Boal and McCartney successfully received £50,000 each for substantial damages.

Liebeck v. McDonald’s – The hot coffee lawsuit (US)

On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck ordered a 49-cent cup of coffee from a McDonald’s drive-through. She was in the passenger’s seat of her grandson’s car, which did not have cup holders. In the process of trying to add cream and sugar, Liebeck put the coffee between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid to remove it but accidentally spilled the entire cup. As she was wearing cotton trousers, they absorbed the coffee and fused to her skin, causing third-degree burns.

After eight days in hospital and undergoing skin grafting, Liebeck lost 20 pounds and needed extra care for three weeks. She was left partially disabled for the next two years. Liebeck sought to receive $20,000 from McDonald’s to cover her medical expenses, but they only offered $800. She then filed a lawsuit against the chain, accusing them of gross negligence for selling coffee that was “defectively manufactured” and “unreasonably dangerous”. After two more attempts to settle, and McDonald’s refusing twice, the case went to trial. During the hearings, it was revealed that the chain had received more than 700 reports of people being burned by their coffee. The jury found McDonald’s was 80% responsible for the incident and awarded Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages. She also received $2.7 million in punitive damages, calculated by the jurors as two days’ worth of coffee sales for McDonald’s.

Pearson V. Chung – The Pants Lawsuit (US)

In 2005, Roy Pearson, a former D.C administrative judge, filed a civil case against his dry cleaning company over a lost pair of trousers. Pearson allegedly left a pair of grey trousers, distinguishable by a unique trio of belt loops, at Custom Cleaners. After a delay due to the trousers accidentally being sent to another dry cleaners, the trousers were returned a few days later. But Pearson refused to accept the trousers, claiming they were not his, despite confirmation from the dry cleaners’ records, tags and Pearson’s receipt.

Pearson demanded $1,000 to cover the cost of the “lost” trousers, but the Chungs, the owners of the dry cleaners, refused.  As a result, he filed a lawsuit based on the issue of ownership of the presented pair of trousers and that the company’s signs “Same Day Service” and “Satisfaction Guaranteed” were misleading. The Chungs offered settlements three times in the sums of $3,000, $4,600 and $12,000, all of which Pearson rejected. Pearson demanded $54 million in damages for inconvenience, mental anguish and fees for representing himself. He lost after four years of trying every legal avenue to win.

An article by The Washington Post in 2016 revealed Roy Pearson may face sanctions: “On June 3, a three-person hearing committee for the D.C Board on Professional Responsibility found Pearson committed two ethics violations of interfering with the administration of justice and presenting arguments not supported by facts or law.”

Credit: http://www.lawabsolute.com/recruitment-news/article/most-bizarre-legal-cases-throughout-history

One of the most enjoyable things about studying Law is the sheer strangeness of some of the cases you’ll encounter.

You might think that cases involving nuisance would just be neighbours with their music turned up too loud, or contract law would just be about businesspeople trying to get one over on each other in a deal, but it can be so much more odd and so much more fun than this. Often, the really bizarre cases are the ones you’ll end up studying, too, as they are the ones that legislation didn’t plan for and that raised questions and issues that hadn’t come up previously.
In this article, we look at some of the funniest, oddest and most entertaining cases you’re likely to come across at the start of a Law degree – we hope it whets your appetite for more.

1. Miller v Jackson

On the face of it, this case doesn’t seem that exciting. The Millers moved house next to a cricket pitch, and complained about the nuisance of the cricketers playing and cricket balls landing in their back garden. They went to court to try to prevent cricket being played there. They were turned down.

But all the same, this case is one where virtually every Law student can quote at least some of the judgment. It opens, “In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well…” and continues in a similar vein, with the judge, Lord Denning, wondering if the cattle that grazed there before houses were built objected to the cricket.
The final line of the Wikipedia entry on the case provides an equally enjoyable conclusion: “Not long after the case, the Millers moved house.”

2. Carlill v the Carbolic Smoke Ball Co.

At the heart of this case is the question of what constitutes a contract (something that we’ll return to later in this list). Back in 1891, Britain was at the tail end of a flu pandemic that killed around a million people worldwide, and Carbolic Smoke Balls were a quack remedy to avoid getting the flu. It involved putting a tube up your nose, which was attached to a rubber ball filled with carbolic acid, which would cause your nose to run. So confident were the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company in the quality of their product that they offered a £100 reward to anyone who used a Carbolic Smoke Ball regularly and subsequently got the flu – and it’s worth bearing in mind that £100 in 1981 is the equivalent of around £11,500 in today’s money.

Mrs Carlill used the Carbolic Smoke Ball religiously, and came down with the flu all the same. The Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. had said in their advertisements, “£100 reward will be paid by the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company to any person who contracts the increasing epidemic influenza colds, or any disease caused by taking cold, after having used the ball three times daily for two weeks” and also added, “£1000 is deposited with the Alliance Bank, Regent Street, showing our sincerity in the matter” but when Mrs Carlill requested her money, they refused to pay up. The court held that they had entered into a valid contract with Mrs Carlill, and ordered them to hand over the money.

3. Leonard v PepsiCo

In 1999, Pepsi ran an advert in the USA about a points scheme in which a teenager shows up in a Harrier jump jet, with the text: “HARRIER FIGHTER 7,000,000 PEPSI POINTS”. An enterprising 21-year-old saw that points could be bought for 10c each, and sent in a cheque for $700,008.50 to gain the required 7,000,000 points. When Pepsi refused to let him claim a jet worth roughly $23 million, he took them to court for breach of contract.
Disappointingly, Leonard’s claim was rejected on the basis that no one could reasonably take the advert’s offer seriously. But the court’s observations make for a great source of deadpan humour, with comments such as “the callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prize aircraft of the United States Marine Corps.”

4. Proctor & Gamble v HM Revenue & Customs

In the UK, VAT is a tax, currently set at 20%, charged on products that are considered luxuries – so there’s no VAT on apples, milk, or tea, but there is on ice cream, cake decorations, cereal bars, and – crucially – crisps. This was a problem for Proctor & Gamble, producers of Pringles, who would rather not have had to pay a tax bill of around £100m if Pringles were considered crisps.

How could Pringles not be crisps? Well, they’re described on the packaging as a “savoury snack”, and in 2008 a judge ruled that since the type of Pringles in question were only 3% potato flour (and 39% vegetable oil) they couldn’t be said to be “made of potato flour”, and therefore, they weren’t crisps. What they were instead is debatable – but VAT-free, anyway. But in 2009, HMRC appealed and despite Proctor & Gamble’s strenuous arguments that there’s nothing crisp-like about a Pringle, HMRC won and the Pringle was ruled to be a crisp after all.

5. Re A (conjoined twins)

In the second half of this list, we look at some of the more unpleasant (though still odd) cases that the law has had to address.
Re A was a case in England in 2001, where two twins – Gracie and Rosie – were born joined at the abdomen, with Rosie dependent on Gracie to oxygenate her blood. If surgically separated, Gracie had a strong likelihood of survival, but Rosie would die. But if left conjoined, both twins were unlikely to see their first birthdays.

Initially, a judge had ruled that separating the twins would not be murder, but “passive euthanasia”, although the Court of Appeal rejected this ruling. Instead, they argued that the defence of necessity could be used, and that the surgeon would not have mens rea (criminal intent implying culpability) for murder, as he would be carrying out the operation to save Gracie rather than kill Rosie. The operation went ahead, and Gracie is now a teenager who aspires to become a doctor herself.

6. R v Dudley and Stephens

Necessity isn’t always an adequate defence against murder, and that was vividly shown in the case of R v Dudley and Stephens. In 1884, Tom Dudley, Edwin Stephens, Edmund Brooks and Richard Parker were shipwrecked and adrift in a lifeboat 700 miles from the nearest land with no freshwater and only two tins of turnips to eat. This was on the 5th July. By 17th July, they had eaten the turnips and the entirety of a turtle they had managed to catch, and by 24th July, Parker had slipped into a coma. Realising there was no other way to survive, Dudley and Stephens killed Parker, and the three remaining men (including Brooks) resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. On the 29th of July, they were rescued.
When the case was brought to trial, public opinion was highly sympathetic to Dudley and Stephens, to the extent that their defence was paid for by public opinion. At the same time, the judiciary wanted it established that necessity was not a defence for murder. The ultimate outcome of the case was something of a compromise: Dudley and Stephens were convicted of murder, but sentenced to just 6 months in prison.

7. Hollywood Silver Fox Farm v Emmett

If you’ve ever been irritated by a neighbour who deliberately turned their music up to annoy you, you have the Hollywood Silver Fox Farm to thank for the fact that you’re in the right and they’re in the wrong.

But in this case, it wasn’t about loud music. The neighbour, Emmett, had fallen out with the owners of the Hollywood Silver Fox Farm, and tried to disrupt their business of breeding silver foxes for the fur industry. Silver foxes are extremely nervy creatures and are likely to miscarry if disturbed when pregnant, so Emmett got his son to fire a gun repeatedly on the border between his land and the fox farm’s breeding pens, in order to upset the foxes and damage his neighbour’s business. In court, Emmett defended his actions by saying the foxes were unusually sensitive and he had the right to use his land in a reasonable manner. But the court ruled that no one has “the absolute right to create noises upon his own land, because any right which the law gives him is qualified by the condition that it must not be exercised to the nuisance of his neighbours”. And thank goodness for that.

8. R v Thabo-Meli

If you thought R v Dudley and Stephens was gruesome, you might want to skip past this one!
In 1954, four men in a criminal gang decided to commit a murder and make it look like an accident. They brought their victim to a hut, got him heavily drunk, and hit him around the head with the intent of killing him. Believing they had killed him (although they had only knocked him unconscious), they threw his body over a cliff. He survived that, too (!), but later died of exposure.

To commit murder, you need to have a mens rea (guilty mind) and actus reus (guilty deed) at the same time – killing someone when you didn’t intend to isn’t murder, and thinking of killing someone but not doing it isn’t murder either. In court, the gang argued that they had intended to kill him in the hut, and actually killed him by leaving him exposed to the elements at the base of the cliff – but that mens rea and actus reus had not happened at the same time – in much the same way as if you thought of your friend “I wish he were dead!” and then accidentally dropped a piano on them two months later, the earlier thought wouldn’t make the accident count as murder. But if this seems absurd, be reassured – the ruling said that it was all part of the same act, and found them guilty of murder.

9. R v Rabey

Wayne Rabey was a 20-year-old geology student in Canada in 1980, who was interested in a female student in his class. So far, so much like normal university life. But when they were studying together, Rabey found a letter than the woman had written to a friend of hers, where she said that Rabey “bugged” her, and described him as “nothing”, while also mentioning that she was interested in someone else.

When Rabey met her in the corridor later that day, he asked her what she thought of him. She told him she saw him as a friend, and he attacked her and hit her with a rock sample (being a geology student, he had this to hand). At the trial, he claimed that he had suffered such a psychological blow that he had slipped into a state of automatism, but that this was a one-off and wasn’t likely to happen again; it was “non-insane automatism”. The court held – and the Supreme Court, following an appeal, agreed – that if he had entered a dissociative state, this was “insane automatism” requiring psychological treatment, and non-insane automatism wouldn’t count as a defence – presumably to the relief of fellow geology students everywhere.

10. Presho v Doohan

In the 1970s, Neville Presho, an engineer, visited the remote Tory Island off the north-west coast of Ireland and fell so deeply in love with it that he gave up his career to make a film about life there. In 1982, he bought a house on the island, though he then settled down in New Zealand. Ten years later, he received a request to buy the house. The prospective buyer offered just a seventh of the price that Presho had asked, so he turned the offer down. In 1994, he received a letter from the local council saying that storm damage had left his house in a dangerous state (which seemed unlikely given its metre-thick stone walls), so he went to visit the island and see. He arrived to find his house had vanished without a trace – and the hotel opposite had extended its car park on to the land where the house had once stood. The disappearance of the house seemed so bizarre that Presho suffered a mental breakdown.

After long investigation, it transpired that the house had burned down in an arson attack. Presho took the owner of the hotel, Patrick Doohan, to court, and though the arson could not be proven to have been carried out by Doohan, Presho was awarded damages for trespass and interference, as Doohan could be shown to be responsible for removing the remains of the house and had gained from its destruction. In 2013, Presho said, “The island is lovely. What happened on the island with the house is very sad and it has caused lots of problems for me. But at the end of the day, you just have to forgive everybody, because you can’t hang on to everything.”
Have these weird and wonderful cases left you eager to learn more about Law? If so, you should take a look at our Introduction to Law and Law School Preparation courses now!

Source: https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/weird-wonderful-law-cases

A woman’s body is found in London. DNA turns up a hit, yet the suspect apparently died weeks before the alleged victim. Here, forensic scientist Dr Mike Silverman tells the story of one of the strangest cases of his career.

It was a real-life mystery that could have come straight from the pages of a modern-day detective novel.

During the late 1970s… the idea of being able to identify someone from a few tiny drops of blood seemed like something out of science fiction

A woman had been brutally murdered in London and biological material had been found under her fingernails, possibly indicating that she might have scratched her attacker just before she died.

A sample of the material was analysed and results compared with the National DNA database and quickly came back with a positive match.

The problem was, the “hit” identified a woman who had herself been murdered – a full three weeks before the death of her alleged “victim”.

The killings had taken place in different areas of the capital and were being investigated by separate teams of detectives.

With no sign of a connection between the two women and nothing to suggest they had ever met, the most “likely” scenario was that the samples had been mixed-up or contaminated at the one obvious place that they had come together – the forensic laboratory. A complaint was made by the senior investigating officer.

It was 1997 and I was the national account manager for the Forensic Science Service at the time, so it was my responsibility to find out if a mistake had been made at the laboratory.

My first thought was that perhaps the second victim’s fingernail clipping had been mislabelled and had actually come from the first victim all along. As soon as I started to look at the samples, I could see this wasn’t the case.

The victim had painted her nails with a distinctive leopard skin pattern and the cuttings that had been taken bore the exact same pattern. There was no doubt that they were the correct ones.

I then checked through the laboratory records to see if there was any way the samples could have been accidentally mixed-up.

This too turned out to be a non-starter as the two sets of samples had never been out of the lab’s exhibit store at the same time. In any event, several weeks had passed between the analysis of the first and second clippings and different members of staff had been involved.

Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, I decided to look more closely at how the clippings themselves had come to be collected and discovered that both bodies had undergone an autopsy at the same mortuary, though they had arrived there several weeks apart.

Forensic autopsies – those carried out in the case of murder or suspicious death – are far more detailed and involved than standard, non-criminal autopsies. Among other examinations, blood and organ samples are collected for toxicological testing, stomach contents are collected and analysed and fingernails are scraped and clipped.

It was while I was examining the mortuary records that I came across a possible answer. It transpired that the body of the first murder victim had been kept in the freezer for several weeks while the police carried out their initial investigation.

It had been removed from the freezer to allow the pathologist to take additional nail clippings the day before the body of the second murder victim had arrived at the mortuary.

The following day, the same pair of scissors had been used to cut the nails of the second murder victim. Although the scissors had been cleaned between uses, I couldn’t help but wonder whether sufficient genetic material had survived the cleaning process to transfer onto the second victim’s nails and then produce a DNA profile in the subsequent analysis.

I had started my career in forensic science during the late 1970s and back then, the idea of being able to identify someone from a few tiny drops of blood seemed like something out of science fiction.

In those early days, we rarely wore protective clothing at crime scenes or worried about potential contamination because there was no method to analyse any biological material that was as small as the eye could see.

Today, everyone entering a crime scene has to don a new, clean paper over-suit and overshoes as well as gloves since DNA retrieval techniques are now so sensitive that simply lightly touching an object – such as a door knob or knife handle – can leave enough of a trace to carry out a successful DNA analysis.

In 1997, the time of the mystery murder, DNA profiling was only a few years old and, as I was about to discover, the technology was improving so quickly that previously unforeseen problems were beginning to occur.

I arranged for the nail scissors from the mortuary to be analysed and discovered not two but three separate DNA profiles were present. Further examination found DNA contamination on several other mortuary instruments but it was only ever going to present a problem when it came to fingernail scissors.

The autopsy knives, for example, were found to have traces of DNA of several different people on them, but because incisions were never sampled for DNA, cross contamination was not an issue.

I immediately sent out an urgent memo to all coroners, mortuaries and forensic pathologists in the country, highlighting the problem and suggesting that, in the future, all nail clippings should be taken with disposable scissors and that the scissors should then be placed in the evidence bag with the nail clippings to confirm they had only been used once. It’s a system that remains in place to this day.

Modern DNA analysis is now so sensitive that contamination is a major issue, with the potential to send criminal investigations spiralling off in the wrong direction.

In Germany in 2007, traces of DNA belonging to an unknown female were found at the scene of the murder of a police officer.

When run through the German database, identical DNA was found to have been present at the scene of five other murders in Germany and France, along with several burglaries and car thefts. In total, the woman’s DNA was found at 40 separate crime scenes.

The German authorities spent two years and thousands of hours searching for the culprit, only to discover that the DNA had in fact been present on the swabs the crime scene investigators had been using to collect their samples. The swabs had been accidentally contaminated by a woman working at the factory that produced them.

For years DNA has been seen as the ultimate crime-fighting weapon with successful convictions arising from ever smaller traces, but in many ways DNA analysis has become a victim of its own success.

Now that we have the ability to create a DNA profile from just a few human cells, traces can be found almost everywhere.

But as we are all depositing DNA everywhere we go, the significance of finding and analysing these traces will become increasingly open to interpretation unless there is sufficient DNA material present to eliminate the possibility of secondary contact or cross-contamination, or additional evidence supporting direct involvement in the crime.

Dr Mike Silverman is the author of Written In Blood, a history of forensic science.

Credit: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26324244