Surely you have some to share....here's one: Some colleagues of mine were trying a sex assault of a child case a few years ago. Their opponents, fresh from law school and true- believing to beat the band, operated under the theory that if one could conceiveably object, one was obligated to do so. After the morning break of day one, the zealous duo announced they had a motion to make before the jury was brought in. The motion? They moved the court to require the state to "remove the bag." After a few moments of confusion, the judge devined the meaning: the defense wanted state's counsel to place a canvas APRI tote bag out of the jury's sight. The offending bag bore the words "Working for Kids."

The defendant is enjoying 20 years of prison food and the bag now hold a place of honor in my friend's office.

I had a friend in Waco defending man on a particularly bad crime with bad circumstances and no good defense. He presented the judge with a Motion to Change Facts.. It didn't work.....Although I heard the judge got a kick out of the attempt.

Ok, it's a tie between the two above. Both were presented in litigation against local judges; I represented the judges who were sued by a lawyer. The Movant was a long-time attorney who had suffered alcohol-induced brain cell loss before the State Bar finally got him. There are more stories from that interaction than I can log.

If the trial judge had granted the Motion to Strike me, would the lawyer have been permitted to hit me right there in the courtroom, or would propriety have required him to take me out back before letting me have it? Would I have had to file a motion and get it granted before hitting him back? I never learned. The trial court denied the Motion.....

The other one was wackier still -- the judge I was defending was female and the Movant had decided that it was just a plain bad idea for a female lawyer to be permitted to talk to a female judge even in the course of an attorney/client relationship.

Yes, I won the litigation, thank you.

As to the other lawyer, may he Rest in Peace.

All of my colleagues out there who deal with inmate lawsuits and the ROT types have seen their share of wildly silly motions. Perhaps the most amusing I've seen, however, involved one of my office's brightest lawyers, who now is working for the FBI.

At the close of a criminal trial that the defense probably never should have allowed to see a jury, my friend was advising the first-chair lawyer when he realized that the defendant hadn't put on a shred of defensive evidence. Thinking back to his federal civil procedure course in law school, he promptly advised his colleague to move for a directed verdict. The colleague did so. When the judge's laughter finally died down, my friend turned to his more experienced first chair compadre, who mused, "well, that didn't turn out quite like I wanted it to." (I've been corrected on how that story actually played out.)

From the civil end, my favorite was an inmate's motion to have an actual cockroach admitted into evidence. The judge was not amused, nor was he inclined to expand the horizons of invertebrate evidentiary law.

[This message was edited by Scott Brumley on 11-22-04 at .]

just a few weeks ago, my partner and I tried a defendant for wounding one of our deputies during the service of a felony arrest warrant. Our opponents are very inexperienced (I find it harder to try someone who is ignorant or just plain aggressively dumb than it is to try a competent attorney. At least the good ones are predictable.) Anyway, the trial was herky-jerky to begin with: voir dire and then down a day; guilty verdict and down another. The upshot is we got all the way to charge time when my partner snapped on the fact that we had neglected to arraign the d on his rep count. After some feverish study over lunch, we called the judge's attention to our error and told her we would move to reopen and arraign the d when the jury came in for the reading of the charge. I had found a case on point and provided a copy to the defense lawyers. The case said that our remedy was to reopen and arraign sometime before the charge is read. For the defense, motion for new trial was their last chance. Our young opponents could not grasp the procedure; one of them forcefully and repeatedly moved for a new trial, insisting that the case I was relying upon stood for that proposition. The kicker? The judge graciously reopened on her own motion and we arraigned the d....who pled "true!"

Several years ago I'm told that a defendant escaped from Bowie County jail and left a "Writ of Habeas Escapous" filed in the Kangaroo Court etc. some were amused but the judge was not.

I'm sure many ofus have had these anti-government constitutionalit motions--I once dealt with a pro se defendant who filed a motion to dismiss based on the idea that since his family had been here since the Mayflower that he was a soveriegn state in his own person, and that if we wanted to build our highways over his property (which apparently included the whole United States) he couldn't stop us, but that did not give us the right to stop his unregistered, uninspected automobile that he was operating across his own land.

If this doesn't make sense to you, worry not. It didn't to our judge either, and the motion failed.