xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
In June, a judge in Edinburgh, Texas, accepted a plea bargain in which Robert W. Thompson, 46, who had pleaded no contest to aggravated sexual assault of a 7-year-old girl, was sentenced to no jail time but 320 hours of community service, to be specifically spent knitting afghans. (The judge was sympathetic to Thompson’s frail heart condition.)
According to the law on the books in 1998 (since amended), Mitchell Johnson had to be released from prison in Memphis, Tenn., when he turned 21, which was in August. Johnson was the boy who, with a classmate, shot up their school in Jonesboro, Ark., that year, killing four girls and a teacher and wounding 10. According to the law, Johnson will have no criminal record and will presumably be free, for example, to buy a gun.
Low Probability of Rehab Said Glenn A. Reed, 31, upon being sentenced in Waco, Texas, in July to 99 years in prison as a habitual criminal (after rejecting a plea bargain that would have meant a 15-year sentence): “There’s things I choose to do, like, if I go in a store and choose to take a Snickers bar, if you catch me, you catch me. If not, I’m going to go home and eat it up and go on about my business, dog.”
Lena Driskell, 78, who was indicted for the June jealous-rage fatal shooting of her former boyfriend, age 85, in an Atlanta senior citizens’ home, told police upon her arrest, “I did it, and I’d do it again!”
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD
