Law Humor

Swords in the News

By Kevin Underhill

Has anybody else noticed that the number of incidents involving one or more people wielding a sword seems to be on the increase?  It could be that these have been going on all the time and that I have only recently started noticing them, or there could be more and more people out there waving swords around.  It seems important to know the answer to this.

For example, [my Aug. 21 and Nov. 24 posts in 2006?]

Nor is this solely a youth trend (if it is that).  In January 2007, police in Charleroi, Pennyslvania, reported that 66-year-old Beverly Carpenter had attacked an officer who was sent to her home after she reportedly harassed 911 dispatchers.  This sentence in the article jumped out at me: "Police said Carpenter used a phone, a sword, and her teeth to threaten and attack the officer."  No other details, which I thought was a little unusual for a case involving a 66-year-old woman wielding a sword.  The writer may have considered Carpenter's use of her teeth to attack the officer (a tactic you may know as "biting") to be more serious, but more likely he was trying to tie in another report involving the same officer, who was bitten again the next day at a local Wal-Mart.  The article?s headline was "Officer Bitten Twice in Charleroi.")   [WPXI.com 1/26/2007]

Pennsylvania was also the site of a verdict in favor of a man who claimed police had used excessive force to subdue him, leaving him with bruises and (allegedly) migraines.  In their defense, the officers pointed out that at the time they decided to intervene, they had noticed that plaintiff was holding a 4-foot samurai sword and was standing over the body of a crack dealer whom plaintiff had stabbed 80 times and then set on fire.  Plaintiff conceded he had been high on crack and that he had possibly overdone things a bit as a result.  But he said he had not actually resisted arrest and so was entitled to the $35 million he demanded.  The jury found for the plaintiff (a result the judge described as "remarkable"), though it awarded him only one dollar.  I thought this was summed up well by a comment I noticed on Overlawyered.com about this story: "Honestly, I don?t trust cops that much," the commenter wrote, "but I think I trust them more than a guy who just smoked crack, killed his dealer, and then set the corpse on fire."  Well, you're entitled to your opinion, sir.

[Overlawyered, 12/11/06; Allentown Morning Call, 11/29/06]

On the other hand, sometimes the person wielding the sword is a crimefighter, or at least wants to be.  In January 2007 the BBC reported that a pair of plainclothes officers were facing a knife-wielding burglar they had caught in the act, when suddenly "[a]nother man armed with a samurai sword appeared and attacked the man with the knife."  He seems to have subdued the wrongdoer (although the story didn't say exactly how), and then "left the scene."  Police never identified the mysterious ninja who came to their rescue and melted back into the darkness.

Link: BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/6251079.stm
[Tyneside, Laygate, South Shields]

Much less successful was a 2007 crimefighting attempt in Wisconsin case, in which a man heard a woman being assaulted in a nearby apartment, and came to the rescue by kicking down the door and leaping in wielding a 39-inch samurai sword.  A somewhat awkward moment then followed when, instead of an assault in progress, our hero found his neighbor watching pornography.  To me, that would have sufficiently explained matters and I would have been on my way.  But the neighbor said that the man still demanded to know where the victim was and forced him at swordpoint to open all the closet doors in the apartment to prove no one was being held captive.  Finally satisfied, the man then left.  Police said the man later told them "that the rape had been occurring for several hours" before he decided to intervene.

[www.gmtoday.com/news/localstories/2007/Feb_0702202007_03.asp]

Another report on this incident said that the man admitted he had "grabbed the sword, bounded up the stairs, kicked in the apartment door and confronted the man who lived there," but denied he had searched the apartment or actually threatened the neighbor with the sword.  "I had the sword extended," he said, "but that was all."  Apparently he felt the neighbor had overreacted to somone kicking his door down and "extending" a samurai sword at him.  It was just misunderstanding, the man told police, for which he was not to blame.  "I intended to hold [the sword] behind my back and knock," he said, "but . . . instead, what happened happened."  See?  These things just happen.

[news.findlaw.com, 2/21/07]

Full post as published by Lowering the Bar on May 31, 2009 (boomark / email).