Lead Stories
The Litigious Society
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Lucia Kaiser filed a lawsuit in February against the Ohm restaurant in New York City, claiming that her birthday party there in December (with Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones among the 400 guests) did not meet her expectations. The restaurant owner said he fully complied with the contract, but Kaiser is asking for $30 million in damages.
In November inmate Luis Romero, 38, filed a lawsuit against jailers in Farmington, New Mexico, for injuries he suffered when he fell off his bunk and hit his head while changing a lightbulb in his cell. Two months earlier a Wisconsin court of appeals threw out inmate Guadalupe Mendoya’s lawsuit against guards at a Green Bay jail for injuries he suffered when he fell out of bed, inebriated from the 25 drinks he had earlier that night.
In January a jury in Ringgold, Georgia, acquitted Alvin Ridley, 56, of murdering his wife. Most neighbors and relatives of the couple had not seen Virginia Ridley in 25 years, and a long-standing rumor had it that Alvin, an eccentric loner living in a dilapidated, roach-infested house in the Appalachian Mountains, had enslaved Virginia shortly after their wedding and eventually killed her. However, Alvin said Virginia died of an epileptic seizure and showed the jury Virginia’s diaries, which describe her simple lifestyle, passion for privacy, and obsession with her husband.
A 54-year-old woman was run over and killed in February by an Amtrak train in San Jose, California; she was walking on the tracks and listening to the radio on headphones. A middle-aged man was killed in Nairobi in March when he was hit by a bus while running from the All Saints Cathedral, where he had stolen money from the collection plates. And a 73-year-old man was killed in a fistfight in Las Vegas in February; he had challenged a 69-year-old man to determine who was tougher.
