Law McNuggets

A few little things that popped up from the legal realm

• I knew parallel parking was dangerous! A teen in New Jersey was being tought to parallel park by her mother when she (the daughter) accidentally ran her over. The girl "won't face criminal charges." Sure, but how long does she have to wait before she gets to take the parallel parking test again?

• Today's New York Times has a disturbing article about a trend among legislatures to scale back the duty to retreat in self defense cases. Traditionally, a person must retreat as much as possible before using deadly force to defend themselves from an attacker. The idea was that deadly force should be the absolute last resort. These new laws, dubbed either "stand your ground" laws or "shoot first" laws )depending on your political persuasion), stand that on its head. Of course, in an era of preemptive warfare, why not have preemptive self defense?

• OK, I'm not a smoker, but I know that if I had to change my opinion on something in order to be released to grab a puff I might just do it. That's the basis behind an argument that an Ohio man is making in an appeal from a murder conviction. The trial judge forbid the jury taking smoke breaks, so the argument goes that the smokers were more apt to vote to convict and get out so they could get their fix.