Lead Story
In an April interview with the Vancouver Sun, lawyer Russ Stanton complained about winning only $53,000 in damages for a client whose ovary was mistakenly removed during surgery. He cited a case in which a man received $80,000 for a testicle removed by surgical error and said, “In my view, one ovary has got to be worth one testicle.”
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In April a judge in Montreal acquitted Henri Daviault of charges that he raped a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound woman while he was drunk. Daviault, who’d previously been convicted, was granted a new trial in 1993, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that drunkenness could be used as a defense for rape. (Parliament is expected soon to take up legislation that would limit the high court’s decision.)
In Dublin, Virginia, in April, Judge Colin Gibb declared that Marshall Lineberry was entitled to unemployment benefits even though he’d been suspended from his job for fighting. The Volvo plant that employed Lineberry had a tradition in which a man dressed as a rooster would playfully hassle employees reporting late to work. When the rooster approached Lineberry and cock-a-doodle-doed, Lineberry leaped at the “rooster” and began choking him. Judge Gibb found that employees so hated the tradition that someone else would soon have attacked the rooster if Lineberry hadn’t.
According to a news report in the March issue of Spin, artist H.R. Giger, who’s suing the band Danzig for using his artwork on their T-shirts without authorization, needed to serve the complaint papers to bandleader Glenn Danzig in person. Giger hired someone to body surf through the mosh pit during a New York City concert to get the job done.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
