Lead Story
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Arrested in Lewisville, Texas, in February on charges of drug possession, driving while intoxicated, and driving without a license: Fred Flintstone, 34. Taken into custody in Miami in February to begin serving a one-year sentence for his participation in an alien-smuggling conspiracy: King Kong, 52. And buried in San Diego in November: Dom Perigion Champagne, 18. (His parents are Jeron Champagne and Perfect Engelberger.)
Least Competent Criminals
In 2002, 17 U.S. pilots who had been captured in the 1991 gulf war and tortured in Iraqi prisons filed a lawsuit seeking compensation. Ordinarily foreign nations are immune from being sued, but a 1996 congressional act stripped this immunity from Iraq and six other nations identified as supporting terrorism. In 2003, a federal judge ruled in their favor and awarded them nearly $1 billion, to be paid from Saddam Hussein’s frozen assets. But the Bush administration intervened, arguing that the president’s emergency powers allowed him to set aside judgments against Iraq and remove it from the list of states sponsoring terrorism, and that the money was needed to rebuild the country. A U.S. court of appeals sided with the government–which, according to the POWs’ lawyers, has refused to even discuss a settlement–and threw out the suit. The Washington Post reported in February that the POWs have petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case. (The Post also pointed out that defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate committee last year he supported compensating Iraqi prisoners for abuse suffered at Abu Ghraib–the same prison at which many of the POWs were tortured in 1991.)
In June 2004 Beth Rice and Stanley Blacker held a lavish wedding weekend in Las Vegas, exchanging vows and rings in a traditional ceremony before a rabbi and 50 guests, after which they honeymooned in Europe, then returned to their house near Tampa. However, a judge ruled in January that because the couple never got a marriage license (a deliberate failure on their part), legally Rice had not remarried–she and Blacker wouldn’t be able to file a joint tax return, he pointed out–and so her ex-husband Michael Rice had to keep paying her $5,000 a month in alimony.
