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In a January article in which a Florida supreme court justice criticized the performance of private defense lawyers hired by the state to handle death-row appeals, the Tampa Tribune reported that death-row inmate Curtis Beasley had been abandoned by state-hired attorney Michael Giordano. This was discovered only by chance months later when a storage facility to which Giordano owed back rent found some of Beasley’s case files and called the attorney general’s office phone number listed on them. The article said state officials had been unable to contact Giordano since.
In January the city commission of Sweetwater, Florida, approved a money-raising plan to sell guns confiscated by police to Lou’s Gun Shop in nearby Hialeah, which according to one national study sells more guns that are later used in crimes than any other dealer in the state.
Roy Boothe Jr., 18, was arrested after allegedly attempting to rob a convenience store near York, Pennsylvania, in January. Surveillance video showed he threatened the two female clerks, aged 18 and 24, with a tire iron, but almost immediately the women started punching and kicking him, and soon he was on the floor begging them to stop.
One night last summer in Durango, Colorado, Taylor Ostergaard and Lindsey Zellitti, then 17 and 18, decided to bake cookies and leave them anonymously on neighbors’ doorsteps with heart-shaped notes saying “Have a great night.” But 49-year-old Wanita Young said hearing strangers at her door at 10:20 PM and finding the mysterious batch of cookies caused her to suffer an anxiety attack, requiring treatment at an emergency room the next day. The girls’ families offered to reimburse Young for medical expenses, but Young declined, saying their apologies were insufficiently sincere, and in January a court ordered Ostergaard and Zellitti to pay Young $930. (Listeners of a Denver radio station subsequently donated more than enough money to cover the fine.)
