Lead Stories
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The wise judiciary: In December a judge in Bloomfield, Iowa, sentenced two men who had clubbed 23 cats with baseball bats (killing 16) to one day in jail per cat, but then suspended even that sentence. Also in December a judge in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, sentenced the men who beat a man to death on the eve of his wedding to a mere 16 months in prison. In reaction, a Dutch inmate serving eight years for stomping someone to death asked Queen Beatrix for a pardon, claiming his own sentence was too severe in comparison. And in January a judge in Mexico City freed confessed killer-bandit Alonso Gonzalez, calling him “a modern Robin Hood, who not only shares what he earns from robberies, but gives his companions more money [than he keeps].”
Police Blotter
In September workers delivering crates to a museum in the Hague, Netherlands, accidentally dropped one containing a 75-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton, breaking it into 188 pieces. And in January, during a break-in at a museum in Ito, Japan, a thief being chased by a guard dropped a 600-year-old Ming Dynasty platter worth about $400,000, shattering it.
Inexplicable
