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Warning!!!
Reading this article may cause paper cuts. The plastic wrapping on subscription copies could cause suffocation if pressed hard against mouth and nose while you're simultaneously holding your breath. Because of Reader's Digest's diminutive size, you might be tempted to swallow it. Do not! You could choke on the advertising inserts!
Sorry about the above statement, but our legal department insisted on it. You can't be too safe. After all, while Americans hate lawyers, we love lawsuits, especially the crazy ones.
Take the case of the Lodi, California, city employee who accidentally drove a dump truck into Curtis Gokey's parked truck a few years ago. Gokey sued the city, even though he was the one driving the dump truck.
For some injured parties, no law need even be broken before they wield the lawyer card. In Jurupa, California, a retired Navy Reserve captain is threatening to sue her colleagues on the school board if they don't start addressing her by her military title. And a while back, a father took his son's Little League coach to court over a losing season.
Protect Me From Myself
The two prisoners waited to make their move until the guards left Wing 4B, the maximum-security section of Colorado's Pueblo County Jail. Then they slid open their defective cell doors, collected bedsheets and mattress covers from other inmates, and headed to the showers. There they pried off a broken ceiling tile and climbed into a vent, which led them to the roof via a door that was latched from the inside. Once on the roof, the prisoners, Scott Anthony Gomez Jr. and Oscar Mercado, tied the sheets and mattress covers together into a makeshift rope, secured it to a gas pipe, and began to rappel down the northwest side of the jail.
That's when the Great Escape of '07 went to hell in a handbasket. Gomez slipped and fell 40 feet, injuring himself; he was rushed to the hospital, and Mercado was caught soon after.
So how did Gomez while away the hours during his recovery? By filing a lawsuit against the county board of commissioners, sheriff, and guards—for as much as the law would allow—on the grounds that they made it too easy for him to escape. He should know, since this was his second attempt. In his suit, Gomez claimed that the cell doors opened too easily and that guards vacated their posts and ignored information that a jailbreak was nigh. They were practically begging him to break out, he insisted. And who was he to disappoint?
"The defendants knew or should have known that the jail was not secure," read his complaint. "Furthermore, defendants knew that the plaintiff had a propensity to escape."
Disposition: Gomez couldn't escape the fact that he didn't have a case, which the judge tossed out last September.
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