The law and the jungle

Jenny Kephart, the woman with the "How dare you not do your duty to keep me from hurting myself" lawsuit, keeps plodding along, and her case against the casino that took her for $1 million will be heard by the Indiana Supreme Court. UPI dug up a professor who says there must be something about the case that distinguishes it from similar cases in which the casinos have won. But it sounds like the same old "everybody's fault but mine" argument to me:

I suspect this is one of those cases in which the city feels it has to fight to the bitter end in fear of setting some kind of precedent. God knows what trouble in might get in if it got the reputation of being soft on back-pay issues. But it does not seem to be in a very sympathetic situation:

19-year old Alison Lesch of Auburn faces a preliminary charge of attempted murder for putting her hours-old newborn daugher in a garbage bag and leaving her in a Dumpster. It is being suggested that she could have avoided the whole unpleasantness of being arrested if she had just been thinking clearly:

It's not absolute, but we have something called the "American bystander rule." (pdf file) In the United States in general, we do not have have a legal duty to intervene if someone else is in danger (regardless of whatever moral duty we might or might not have). Would we be better served with something like the Good Samaritan rule in Europe and some jurisdictions here that requires intervention, at least of the level of reporting a crime?

Fishers has seen an increase in property crime in the last few years, and since "it is unclear why," somebody has to explain it to befuddled residents:

Experts say changes in crime have little to do with the economy. Instead, they say Fishers' growth likely is a factor in the increase.

There's a lot of libertarian outrage out there today over the arrest of a Virginia man who was charged with indecent exposure for walking around naked in his own home. He says he was just making coffee at the time (early in the morning), but the complaining mother who was walking with her 7-year-old son says he stood naked in the doorway and then moved in front of an open window so they could still see him as they continued by the place.

Apparently, the Obama administration is planning to announce new federal policy guidelines that call for ignoring medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws. Such a move would be a step in the right direction:

I swear, isn't having a casino the greatest gig in the world? It's supposed to be gambling, which means some people win and some lose, but the hosue almost always wins, and if the house does start losing too much to someone, he's just kicked out:

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are making the news lately. Besides the Indianapolis guy in the police standoff, today we read about two more. First is this story from Winchester:

An eastern Indiana Iraq War veteran accused of shooting at sheriff's deputies is being held on $500,000 bond.

And this is from Muncie: