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A Texas jury decided in 1991 that Steven Kenneth Staley should be put to death for murdering a restaurant manager, but six days before his February 2006 execution date Judge Wayne Salvant granted him a stay, having heard doctors’ testimony that his mental illness would keep him from understanding why he was being killed. Prosecutors then moved to force the 43-year-old Staley to take antipsychotic medication that might make him competent, and in April Salvant granted the motion (but gave Staley’s lawyer time to appeal). Though a federal appeals court ruled in 2003 that an Arkansas prison could forcibly medicate an otherwise uncontrollable convict, which ultimately made him eligible to be executed, the Texas case may be the first in which prosecutors have obtained an order to make someone take medication for the express purpose of carrying out his death sentence.
In April the Cincinnati Enquirer provided an update on Robin Sutton and Allan Lade, who last summer were denied permission by the board of zoning appeals in Anderson Township, Ohio, to put a six-foot-high cedar fence around their side yard, despite the near-unanimous support of their neighbors. In response Sutton and Lade set up 15 toilets along the proposed fence line, and, according to a local official, eight months later there’s still nothing the zoning board can do about it.
Authorities in Dresden, Germany, charged 47-year-old Petra Kujau with fraud in April for allegedly selling at least 500 copies of famous paintings, including the Mona Lisa and works by Monet, through an online auction site. Buyers knew they weren’t getting the originals–the paintings were advertised as fakes painted by Kujau’s late great-uncle Konrad Kujau, a prolific forger best known for the fake Hitler diaries he briefly passed off as real in the 1980s. But police said these paintings weren’t real Kujaus either: Petra allegedly bought them in bulk from art schools in Asia, then forged Konrad’s signature on them (he’d started signing his fakes after serving jail time for the Hitler fraud) and sold them as his work for as much as $4,500 apiece.
