A Texas jury decided in 1991 that Steven Kenneth Staley, now 43, should be put to death for killing a restaurant manager, but three days before his February 2006 date with destiny, psychologists testified that he is mentally ill, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a mentally ill person cannot be executed. The solution, declared state judge Wayne Salvant in April, is for the state to inject Staley with enough psychotropic medicine to make him sufficiently sane to understand why he is going to die, at which point he can be killed. (In similar cases, drugs improved Charles Singleton enough for his 2004 execution in Arkansas, but have failed since 1999 to restore Texan Emanuel Kemp's competency.) [Fort Worth Star Telegram, 4-15-06]
Prosecutors in Dresden, Germany, charged Petra Kujau, 47, with fraud recently for selling at least 500 fake paintings of such artists as Monet, Picasso and Van Gogh. However, the paintings were always clearly labeled as fakes, according to an April Times of London dispatch, and their sale was a crime only because Petra had claimed they had been painted by Konrad Kujau (her great uncle), who had a worldwide reputation as a master faker. Thus, Petra is charged with duping collectors into thinking that they were buying original Konrad Kujau classic fakes. [The Times (London), 4-22-06]
In April, the organization Gymnastics Australia ordered cheerleader teams to supply less-revealing uniforms (e.g., no bare midriffs), based not on alleged "indecency" but on its fear that the exhibition of too-svelte cheerleaders' bodies would make overweight girls feel bad and lead to eating disorders. (2) Greater Manchester (England) police filed a criminal charge against a 10-year-old boy who, in a schoolyard spat, called a classmate a "Paki" and "bin Laden" and, allegedly, the "n" word. Judge Jonathan Finestein of Salyer youth court urged prosecutors in April to deal with the matter in some other way (and in fact, the defendant told the court that the two boys are now friends). [Chicago Tribune-AP, 4-16-06] [Daily Telegraph (London), 4-7-06]
