In August, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration dropped all charges against a doctor who has been at the center of a prescription-drug fraud case because, said prosecutors, they have too much evidence against him and not enough space to store it. The U.S. attorney in northern Iowa said her office needs to clear out the 400,000 paper documents and two terabytes of electronic data (the latter of which under current technology takes up little space but in DEA's antiquated computer system hogs 5 percent of the agency's worldwide electronic storage). The accused, Dr. Armando Angulo, has lived since 2004 in Panama, which will not extradite him. (He remains under indictment on state charges in Florida.)
If Megan Duskey's parents had been with her that night in 2010, they perhaps would have insisted she (dressed as the comic book hero Silver Spectre) not try to slide down the railing during the Halloween-themed ball at Chicago's Palmer House Hilton hotel, but she did slide down, and she fell four floors to her death. Nonetheless, in July 2012, the parents filed a $500,000 lawsuit against Hilton and other entities, claiming that the death of Ms. Duskey at age 23 was the hotel's and the sponsors' fault.
In July, a California appeals court reinstated police officer Enrique Chavez's lawsuit against the Austrian gun manufacturer Glock for its "unsafe" design. Chavez is now paralyzed from the waist down because his 3-year-old son got hold of the gun and accidentally fired it, hitting his dad. Chavez, in violation of police policies, had left the gun loaded underneath the front seat of his car, and his son, whom Chavez had not belted into a child seat, was free to explore while Dad drove. The gun is regarded as of safe design by dozens, if not hundreds, of police departments, and the LAPD disciplined Chavez over the incident.
A July battle in the House of Representatives pitted austerity-driven members striving to cut $72 million in spending on NASCAR against North Carolina House members determined to keep the money in. (Most NASCAR teams are headquartered in the state, as is the Charlotte Motor Speedway and the NASCAR Hall of Fame.) More than a third of the money would go to the National Guard for sponsoring driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. The North Carolina legislators believe military recruitment will suffer unless the race- car connection is maintained.
In July a 30-year-old man suspected of skipping out on a bar bill at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester, N.H., did not make it far. As he tried to hop an iron fence, he impaled his leg and eventually required eight firefighters to rescue him using hydraulic cutting tools.
Greyston Garcia, 26, who was cleared of murder charges in January under Florida's "stand your ground" defense (even though he had chased the victim more than a block to stab him to death after the man took his radio), was inadvertently killed in June by random gang gunfire in Miami.
