News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Trial judge Florentino Floro was fired by the Philippines supreme court in April, and his appeal rejected in August, after investigators found that he had claimed to rely on three mystic dwarves (Armand, Luis and Angel) for psychic powers and the ability to write while in a trance. (Floro protested media accounts of his firing to The Wall Street Journal in July, denying that dwarves helped him decide cases and writing that Armand, Luis and Angel are merely “spirit guides” and that he himself is “gifted” from God “to heal and to prophesy.”)
“I shouldn’t even be doing this,” said Judge Gary F. McKinley in a Kenton, Ohio, courtroom in August. “I’m cutting you somewhat of a break,” he told two star athletes of Kenton High who had just been convicted of vehicular vandalism in a prank that caused two men serious, life-long disabilities. The kids’ sentence: 60 days in juvenile detention (plus community service), but only after football season. (The families of the victims were appalled, especially the family of the one who was brain-damaged.)
Judge Paul E. Zellerbach was admonished by California’s judicial agency in August for behavior in October 2004, when he left a jury deliberating a murder charge in order to attend an Angels-Red Sox playoff game and declined to leave the game when notified that the jury had reached a verdict (forcing everyone to return the next day).
(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
