Things that make you go "WTF?"

I just want to know how anyone manages to rack up $1 million worth of electricity bills.

I don't think my lifelong electrical usage would add up to that much.

Because nothing good comes without a downside

Granted, as a criminal defense attorney I don't deal in what most movers and shakers would consider "sensitive" information, but I do deal regularly with confidential information, and I daily produce documents that contain privileged data.

So, this sort of thing is not going to leave me feeling all that comforted.

The attacks were dreamed up by doctoral students Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).

The EPFL students tested 11 different keyboard models that connected to a computer via either a USB or a PS/2 socket. The attacks they developed also worked with keyboards embedded in laptops.

Every keyboard tested was vulnerable to at least one of the four attacks the researchers used.

No, I do not expect myself to be a target of industrial espionage or anything silly like that, but I will not be the least bit surprised if some of the bigger firms end up being on the receiving end of this sort of attack.

An International Entry for the Criminal Justice Darwin Awards

Yeah, I know . . . to get a Darwin award one technically has to die, but I am exercising my editorial fiat over this space to declare that - for the awards I bestow here - one merely need end up in dutch (which does remove you from the breeding population for a while, theoretically) by attempting or carrying out a crime in a particularly stupid way.

So, with no further ado, I present the winner of my first Criminal Justice Darwin Award.

And I had to go international to find him.

A 22-year old man from Manchester decided to break into a grocery store by climbing in its chimney. Predictably, he got stuck, and later had to be removed by firefighters who turned the youngster over to the police, who toddled him off to the pokey . . .

. . . but not before taking him to the hospital for medical attention because, presumably in his struggles to free himself from the chimney, he had wiggled his way out of all of his clothes.

A reminder for those who would forget why the adversarial system exists in its current robust form

I've always hated the phrase "he got off on a technicality."

The Constitution and its preservation is not a technicality.

Rather, it is the singular bulwark that stands between us and societies where injustice runs rampant.

It has, however, been so long since most of us have had to deal with the horror show that occurs when rights aren't respected and preserved that we let our guard down and start talking in terms of "well, if you haven't done anything, what do you have to worry about."

Indeed.

Hundreds of prisoners on Nigeria's death rows did not have a fair trial and may be innocent, rights group Amnesty International (AI) says.

AI says many confessions are extracted under torture and people are sentenced to death on that evidence alone.

If anyone ever complains about Miranda, remind them that this is why it exists. The third degree (the old euphemism for interrogations that essentially involved torture) and its common use was one of the primary impulses behind the ruling in Miranda, as any open-eyed canvas of the case amply demonstrates.

According to the 78-page report, almost 80% of inmates in Nigerian prisons say they have been beaten, threatened with weapons or tortured in police cells

It details how, after a prisoner has been hanged, other death row prisoners are forced to clean the gallows.

"The police are overstretched and under-resourced. Because of this, they rely heavily on confessions to 'solve' crimes - rather than on expensive investigations," Ms van Kregten said.

Of course, these abuses are only made worse when corruption runs rampant in the criminal enforcement structure.

"I am not an armed robber. I am a shoemaker. I bought a [motorcycle] from someone who stole it," death row inmate Jafar, 57, told Amnesty.

He filed an appeal 24 years ago, but he is still waiting for it to be heard as his case file has gone missing.

"The police asked me to be a witness. They got the man who sold [me] the [motorcycle] but shot him to death. After that, I became the suspect."

In the report, many prisoners said that when the police picked them up, they asked for money to release them.

Those who could not pay were treated as suspected armed robbers, they say.

This sort of thing is the reason why so many defense attorneys believe so fervently in the adversarial system, and why so very many of us live by the credo that it is better to release a guilty man than convict an innocent.

Only in Lawyer-Land

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this case before, but like all of the truly too surreal to be true and yet it is things from the realm of the law, it really is the gift that just keeps on giving.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A judge has thrown out a Nebraska legislator's lawsuit against God, saying the Almighty wasn't properly served due to his unlisted home address.

The beautiful thing is that isn't even the best part. This is:

Chambers, who graduated from law school but never took the bar exam, thinks he's found a hole in the judge's ruling.

"The court itself acknowledges the existence of God," Chambers said Wednesday. "A consequence of that acknowledgment is a recognition of God's omniscience."

Therefore, Chambers said, "Since God knows everything, God has notice of this lawsuit."

I think I'm going to be giggling about this one for the next week.

And now a little something to restore you faith in humanity

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we're talking about real money

Of late I have not been reading the papers with the same vigor that I used to.

There's a reason for that.

When I pay too close of attention to the news I run across things that make my head want to explode from the sheer painful irony.

For example, on the same day that the wires noted AIG is asking the federal government for more money, the BBC reports that the infamous debt clock in New York City has run out of zeroes .

Easily the most interesting thing I have seen today

It never ceases to amaze me the tools that market researchers can use to determine the effectiveness of various advertising tools.