"This has to stop. You are now sentenced to six years (in jail) with labor," Mapate said, adding that he had been lenient because Seifarth was a first offender.

"Customs of other countries, which are an abomination here, must not be allowed to be practised by tourists or anybody," Mapate added.

A 22-year-old Zambian woman, Pumulo Mbangweta, who performed the sex act on him in a bush near Mazabuka, was not charged, according to court records. Seifarth was convicted under a Zambian morality law which outlaws "unnatural" sex acts and provides for a maximum jail term of 14 years. Seifarth, who conducted his own defence, had told the court that he was not aware that oral sex was illegal in Zambia. But the magistrate ruled that ignorance of the law was no defence.

People Different From Us
From the police column of the weekly Leonard Graphic (Leonard, Texas, 35 miles north of Dallas), May 3, 2001: "A man claiming to be a medical student was charged with theft of service and given a trespass warning after it was discovered he lied about his reasons for being in the local nursing home two months ago. He told aides there he had permission from the home to 'live the life of the patient' and be bathed and diapered as part of a learning experience. However, when he returned to try the scam again on April 17, police were waiting for him. He was found to be a registered sex offender living in Melissa (Texas)." [Leonard Graphic, 5-3-01]



Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Six men were indicted in New York City in October for operating a drug ring, which came to the attention of firefighters, and then police, when one of the men curiously refused to evacuate his apartment across the street from the World Trade Center in the late morning of Sept. 11, despite the area's fires, falling debris and widespread panic. The reason: Inside, police found large supplies of drugs and paraphernalia. [Reuters, 10-25-01]




A mother, frustrated that a Sallie Mae loan office would not believe that her debtor-son was deceased, mailed them the cremation certificate and two teaspoons of his ashes, which not only was inadequate proof but caused a full anthrax panic (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.).


Descendants of the 19th-century feuding Hatfields and McCoys resumed battling, in court, over whether McCoys are being blocked from a cemetery whose main access is controlled by the Hatfields (Pikeville, Ky.).


According to an October dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph, Greenland operates probably the world's most inmate-friendly prison (with all residents having jobs on the outside at market wages and enjoying recreational excursions such as fishing and shopping), emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment (though its recommital rate isn't any better than other prisons'). Guards do take up arms, but only on weekend hunting trips, when the inmates themselves are armed. The main advantage of the system seems to be that court sessions are brief, in that criminals, not fearing prison, usually confess to everything.



Those dreading the legal morass of casualty claims emanating from the Sept. 11 attacks will be even more disturbed knowing the current status of claims emanating from the 1993 World Trade Center basement truck-bomb attack. As of Sept. 11, according to an October National Law Journal report, pre-trial discovery was still taking place on "hundreds" of 1993 claims (personal injury lawsuits and property-damage and business-interruption claims) pending before a New York state judge, including at least one on behalf of Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm most devastated on Sept. 11.



One notable consistency between the Clinton and Bush administrations is that the Department of the Interior still is not certain how to remedy what federal judge Royce Lamberth has called the government's squandering of more than $10 billion in Indian trust funds (payments for grazing, mining, logging and oil-drilling on Indian land) that it was required to manage starting in 1887. In 1999, the department said it was unable to examine some trust fund records because they were filed in decrepit rooms with so much rat feces as to be hazardous. In October 2001, a status report was prepared for Lamberth, but various department officials declined to sign it because of a lack of confidence that it was truthful.



According to a dispatch from Nigeria reported in the Cape Argus (Cape Town, South Africa), Ms. Amina Haruna, 22, of Gusau, Nigeria, was turned down by a Muslim court in August in her quest to divorce her husband, Malam Hassan Mujahid, on the apparently sole ground that his penis is too large for her. The court ruled that it could not determine, even after examining doctors' reports on the couple, whether the size discrepancy was sufficiently great to make the couple incompatible.

Thinning the Herd
In a road-rage chase that ended when the pursuing car wrapped itself around a tree, its driver and the front-seat passenger who egged him on were killed, and the driver being chased (who stopped twice to attempt to apologize but was threatened and cursed and so kept on driving) was unharmed (Clearwater, Fla., August).

And a 19-year-old man became the latest wild-cruising teen-ager to die by sticking his head out the passenger window at the wrong moment (utility pole) (East Meadow, N.Y., September).


The British government aborted its study of whether mad-cow disease can spread to sheep after it realized it had been mistakenly studying cow brains for five years instead of sheep brains.



Dionne French filed a lawsuit in federal court in New Mexico in October over a 1998 incident, charging the Santa Fe Southern Railway and a conductor and brakeman with negligence in not stopping a train in time to avoid hitting her. French, who was homeless at the time and living near Santa Fe, admitted that she was lying on the tracks asleep, and with a brown blanket over her, but said the railroad still had the obligation to detect her presence and stop. [The New Mexican, 10-18-01]



It Actually Happens: Dorothy M. Ellis Williams filed a lawsuit in July against the QuikTrip gas station in Edwardsville, Ill., for injuries to her back and knee when she slipped on a banana peel while walking out the front door. [Belleville News-Democrat, 7-13-01]



Scott Bender filed a lawsuit against U.S. Airways in October, charging that a crew on a February flight from North Carolina had closed up the plane that was parked at a gate in Birmingham, Ala., and left him sleeping in his seat. Bender said he deserves some money from the airline because when he woke up, it was pitch black, and he thought for a few seconds that he was dead. [Birmingham News, 10-4-01]



Sex Crimes on Trial
Sudanese-born gynecologist Darwish Hasan Darwish dropped to his knees and praised Allah after he was found not guilty by a jury at Preston (England) Crown Court in October on a charge that he had raped a woman whom he had put under hypnosis. The woman later gave birth to his child, which was assumed for years to have been her husband's, until her husband, who is a plumber, installed a sauna in the Darwish home and noticed a resemblance between one of Darwish's daughters and his own. The jury apparently believed the sex might have been consensual, but among the things the judge did not permit jurors to know was that Dr. Darwish had already been convicted of having sex with patients under similar circumstances nine times. [London Daily Telegraph, 10-10-01]



In July, Dr. Richard Dye of Half Moon Bay, Calif., was acquitted of sexual assault on female patients despite his admission that he had therapeutically brought at least four women to climax on his examination table during his years as a family practitioner. (Police said he had told them it was "100" women.) Though several woman had made complaints against him, a large contingent of his female patients attended the trial, enthusiastically supporting him. [San Francisco Chronicle, 7-26-01]




People Different From Us
In an incident resembling a movie scene, Alan Martin, 49, was hospitalized in fair condition after being run over on Oct. 1. He had deliberately lain down in the middle of a busy street in Daly City, Calif., as a protest against officers' confiscating his RV, which had just been involved in a minor accident. Martin refused to budge from the street so officers tried to shield his body for a while by blocking a lane of traffic with their cruisers, but then along came one of those notorious California hot-pursuit police chases, with the car driven by fleeing suspect Kevin Domino, 37, accidentally ramming the stopped cruiser, then driving over Martin's body, then trying to straighten out his car and inadvertently running over Martin again, before taking off. (Police caught Domino a few blocks later when his car stalled out.) [San Francisco Chronicle, 10-3-01]



A 22-year-old man got 60 years in prison for shooting two guys who laughed at his brother's haircut (shaved all around except for a patch of hair surrounding his pony tail) (Chicago). [Chicago Tribune, 11-17-01]