Kansas lawyer Dennis Hawver was disbarred in November for his comically bad (24 separate deficiencies) defense of double-murder suspect Phillip Cheatham in 2005 (which led to a new trial for Cheatham). Hawver had admitted to the jury that his client was a "shooter of people" (a previous manslaughter conviction) who, as an "experience(d)" criminal would never have left the third victim alive with multiple gunshot wounds. A confident Hawver had virtually invited the jury to execute "whoever" the killer was. (At a September hearing to keep his license, he dressed as Thomas Jefferson, banging the lectern and shouting, as reverse psychology, "I am incompetent!") Cheatham told the Topeka Capital-Journal that Hawver is "a good dude [but] just in over his head."

The creative class

To spark interest in a leisure center opening in spring 2015 in Selby in North Yorkshire, England, the management company sponsored a contest to name the center, with the prize being a year's free membership. On Nov. 5, general manager Paul Hirst announced that Steve Wadsworth was the winner. The winning entry: Selby Leisure Centre.

Questionable judgments

In October, a mother charged that officials at E.R. Dickson School in Mobile, Ala., first detained her daughter, 5, for pointing a crayon at another student as if it were a gun, and then pressured the girl to sign a paper promising not to kill anyone or commit suicide. "What is suicide, Mommy?" the girl asked when her parents arrived.

The West Briton newspaper reported in October that a darts team composed of blind men was ready for its inaugural match at an inn in Grampound, England, sponsored by the St. Austell Bay Rotary Club. The inn's landlord acknowledged that the game-room door would be closed "just in case" a dart strayed off course. (The blind darters would be aided by string attached to the bull's-eye that they could feel for guidance.)

Police report

Twice in September, police in North Kingstown, R.I., received complaints of a motorist who would stop female strangers on the street to tell them jokes about blond women. The jokes were not sexual, but still made the women "uncomfortable." A high school girl told her mother of a similar episode. Based on a license plate number, police visited the man at home, and he agreed to stop.

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