The Strangest Legal Defenses (That Worked!)

Sometimes the law is weird and sometimes legal arguments are weirder.

Welcome back to LegalEagle. The most avian legal analysis on the internets.

GOT A VIDEO IDEA? TELL ME!
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

MY COURSES
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

SOCIAL MEDIA & DISCUSSIONS
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

BUSINESS INQUIRIES
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

LEGAL-ISH DISCLAIMER
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
Sorry, occupational hazard: This is not legal advice, nor can I give you legal advice. I AM NOT YOUR LAWYER. Sorry! Everything here is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem. Nothing here should be construed to form an attorney-client relationship. Also, some of the links in this post may be affiliate links, meaning, at no cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. But if you click, it really helps me make more of these videos! All non-licensed clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes. See Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, 276 F.Supp.3d 34 (S.D.N.Y. 2017); Equals Three, LLC v. Jukin Media, Inc., 139 F. Supp. 3d 1094 (C.D. Cal. 2015).

Special thanks:
Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images
Music provided by Epidemic Sound

[LegalEagle]

👮‍♂ Is there a weird legal case I should cover?

[somethinglikethat]

Judge: you client owes the government millions.

Lawyer: Your honour, X gunna give it to ya.

[anothervagabond]

It's gotta be a pretty hyperspecific mental state that both makes you unable to tell right from wrong but also lets you remain aware enough to know that you should sneak in through a window to avoid metal detectors...

[swimmyswim]

You should cover the case of Brigido Lara! He’s the art forger whose forgeries were so convincing, they tried to charge him with art theft until he proved he was the original creator. And then the museum hired him as an expert because their experts couldn’t tell the difference.

[lostyofficial]

You reminded me of a funny case that happened in Romania in 2018. A guy suffered a work accident in his first day at a new job; got his leg crushed by another person working on a forklift and he couldn't walk anymore. The employer hired detectives to prove that he was bluffing and was able to use his legs; they even got it on video. BUT... it turns out that the detectives followed his 3-year younger brother instead of the incapacitated person. The man won the equivalent of 125.000 dollars and a 125$ monthly payment until he could walk again... which (sadly, if you ask me) might mean for the rest of his life.

[oneandonlycara]

I love the case where here in Germany someone went onto a tram without paying and because in Germany it's not illegal per se to get onto a tram without paying but it's rather declared as something along the lines of fraud, that mad lad got onto the tram while wearing a shield saying "I don't have a ticket" and it actually worked in court

[lazypaladin]

Sidenote: I'm sorry but breaking into the Mayor's Office via window to avoid Metal Dectors? *Sounds an awful lot like pre-meditaion to me!*

[noneayourbusiness]

"The law is complicated, I don't know what to tell you." - the entire basis behind the need for the LegalEagle channel on YouTube summed up in a single sentence!

[robynkolozsvari]

"Twinkie defense" or no, the question of premeditation in the Dan White case is made really obvious by the fact he went out of his way and entered through a window to avoid metal detectors.

[NexusObscura]

The twin thing is really interesting. I’m a criminal division court clerk and we have one set of twins with a lot of cases and I swear every time one twin comes in they say “no that one was my brother.” 🤷‍♀️

[alonealien]

The assassinations of Mayor Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk continue to make me deeply sad. Such a great loss it was! And the fact that this man, Dan White, basically went scot-free after committing double-murder just boggles the mind!

[thedebatehitman]

True story. A female airmen at my base had a positive drug urinalysis for cocaine. Upon being questioned, she did what you should all do under such circumstances, and she STFU and demanded access to her attorney.

To make a long story short, her defense theory was that her boyfriend—with whom she had broken up after popping hot on her drug test—was a cocaine abuser. The defense argued that she had performed oral sex on him the day prior to her urinalysis, and that she must’ve ingested cocaine that he had transferred to his penis when dressing or urinating. The argument might seem like poppycock, but it was apparently enough to give rise to reasonable doubt in the mind of those who decided her case at summary court martial.

[corey]

I worked a county jail where the police dropped off a guy for warrants. We booked him, took the mug shots, do the screenings, run fingerprints, run him through the FBI database, showered him out, housed him, etc. A couple days later, we call him down to be released.

RIGHT BEFORE his paperwork is finished being processed & we send him out the door, we receive a phone call. It's from a person claiming to be this guy we're about to release! The guy says he saw online that he was apparently arrested, & was pissed off as clearly he wasn't. He then suggests the police arrested his twin brother thinking it was him, and that his brother went along with it because he (the brother) has worse warrants!

He tells us his brother's name & info, and sure enough, the dude was wanted for multiple felonies, like aggravated robbery & assaults (as opposed to unpaid traffic tickets that became warrants LOL)! Man did that F*** him over HARD after we confirmed it all. On top of those serious charges, he then had new charges added, along with being labeled an escape risk 🤣

Had he kept on good terms with his twin brother, he'd have walked out a free man after a day or two in jail. Instead, his pissed off twin brother threw him under the bus & ensured he was going to be serving at least 10 years behind bars. Oops!

[dansanger]

The Dan White verdict is really a case of jury nullification. They would have latched onto any excuse in order to go easy on their guy.

[aatragon]

I was on a jury in the 1990's wherein one guy stole a car at gunpoint. He was found later, red-handed, joyriding around in the car and arrested. At the trial, the victim pointed him out and declared, "That's the guy!" The defendant, however, testified that he did not do it, but that the crime was done by his i͎d͎e͎n͎t͎i͎c͎a͎l͎ ͎t͎w͎i͎n͎ ͎b͎r͎o͎t͎h͎e͎r͎. He was merely driving a car he believed to be owned by his brother. Then they trotted out a guy (later revealed to be brought out from jail for the occasion) who looked very like the defendant, particularly from a distance. The victim, however, identified some burn marks on the defendant's gun hand, which he had ample reason to fixate upon during the holdup. After deliberation, we found the defendant guilty. Only after the trial did they reveal to us that this was not their first try at the scam, but it was their first conviction.

[thedullohanvids]

I'm a server and I had a table of people from a local law firm the other day. They were talking about some cases while I served them and one of the guys mentioned the Twinkie defense and it seemed like no one else at the table knew what he was talking about. I said I know what that is and explained it to them. I think they were pretty impressed with me. Thanks to Legal Eagle. 😁

[TheSpeedPlays]

One of my favorite strange legal defenses is when Ken Penders, former writer for Archie Comic's Sonic the Hedgehog was sued by Archie for breach of contract. It's a long story, but the important fact here is that Ken claimed that, because Archie lost his original contract and could only produce a copy of a contractual renewal, that the copy was a fake because Archie Comic's main business was graphic design, and "they would know how to fake something like that."

I can sort of see how a judge could be convinced with that argument, but I'm more stunned how the legal team had the audacity to even try that argument.

[asvarien]

As someone who has suffered from major depression all their life, I can definitively state it has not diminished my capacity to tell right from wrong.

[makinapacal]

The Diminished Capacity defence in the Dan White case was rather dubious. It was obvious by White's behavior that he had planned the whole thing ahead of time. Certainly entering through that window with a gun indicates prior planning and the fact that White after murdering the Mayor White reloaded his gun and then killed Milk doesn't indicate much "diminished capacity".

After the murders Dan White got support from the local Police Union and of course his whole routine of poor me was an attempt to make himself the real "true" "victim". The bottom line is that depressed people can plan and carry out murders, although in this case I wonder just how depressed he really was.

[lordsceptile]

You should talk about the boobs to big defense. It was a Japanese case where a man tired to say a women broke through his window the entered his house. The women was defended by the fact that she couldn’t physically fit through the window because “her boobs where too big.”