The Five Most Hilarious Supreme Court Rulings
The Supreme Court is maybe not taken as seriously as it should be these days, but theoretically, it has the solemn duty to uphold the laws that keep this country from descending into total anarchy. Sometimes, that means making some pretty silly declarations. Such as…
Ghosts Exist for Real Estate Purposes
In 1990, Jeffrey Stambovsky sued the previous owner of the New York house he’d just bought for not telling him that it was haunted. To be clear, everyone believed the ghosts were real — the dispute was whether Stambovsky had been previously informed. The court emphasized in its ruling that the issue at hand was the effect of the publicity surrounding the house’s alleged haunting on its value, but it also said that “as a matter of law, the house is haunted,” so suck on that, skeptics.
Juror Testimony Doesn’t Overturn a Verdict Even If the Jury Was Super High
In 1987, after issuing a guilty verdict in a case of mail fraud, one of the jurors came forward to confess that the jury had been partying like Motley Crue throughout the whole trial. Several of them put away nearly a pitcher of beer each during recesses, the foreperson downed a liter of wine all by themselves, they smoked weed everyday, two of them openly used cocaine and one juror had even sold drugs to another. There’s a little law that juror testimony of misconduct isn’t enough to overturn a verdict, however, so you’d better hope a jury of your wasted peers leaves a lot of evidence.
Trading for Drugs Counts As Using a Gun
You know things are bad when you have to admit you traded a gun for drugs, but in 1993, when John Smith was facing a longer sentence for the use of a firearm in the commission of drug trafficking, he did what he had to do and argued that trading a gun wasn’t “using” it. The court disagreed, ruling that you can “use” a gun as currency as well as a weapon, but a later ruling determined that receiving a gun doesn’t count as using it. Yes, this came up more than once.
Land Ownership Includes an Ambiguous Amount of Sky
If you’ve ever lived near an airport, you know how annoying it is, so imagine living half a mile from a military airstrip during World War II. Thomas Causby did, and he got pretty sick of low-flying planes damaging his farm, to the point of killing his chickens. The court ruled that his property rights did, in fact, extend into the air, but only up to the “navigable airspace.” That was good enough to win his case, but “navigable airspace” can mean different things for different planes, and some can navigate any airspace. Good luck if a helicopter wants to play “I’m not touching you.”
Police Didn’t Need Probable Cause to Crash an Awesome Home Invasion
In 2008, cops entered a D.C. house and found a scene that was a cross between Animal House and Eyes Wide Shut. Everyone inside claimed to have been invited by a woman named Peaches, who wasn’t there and, it turned out, hadn’t officially leased the house yet. Everyone was promptly arrested, but after the charges were dropped, they sued the police for arresting them without probable cause. They initially won nearly $700,000 in damages, but the Supreme Court ruled that pulling a Risky Business was itself probable cause, as no homeowner would allow it on their property, and the fact that they tried to flee when the fuzz rolled in indicated they’d done something wrong.
In other words, you can be arrested for acting shady. What else is new?
