Today's award goes to a prosecutor for most creative pleading in an indictment. Defendant was caught as a "traveler" after connecting up with what he thought was a teen girl online. Prosecutor put the defendant's screen name in the indictment as an alias: "Phillip Ashcraft a/k/a "thebigboner36"". That must have been a fun arraignment.

To read the opinion, click here.

Props to Angela Goodwin in our office for her work on that case - both at trial and on appeal. Great work!

And this area of the law does make for some interesting indictments. As I mentioned at the Crimes Against Children conference, I recently walked in on two of our lawyers (Angela being one of them) involved in a deep conversation about the best way to allege a "strap on" in a child pornography indictment.

Not too long after that, we spent a fair amount of time trying to come up with language in an Online Solicitation indictment to replace the defendant's "I want to do XXXXX to you and here's exactly how I'm gonna do it" talk.... We came up with something somewhat more tasteful and I rather doubt the defense will file a motion to quash for failure to give notice!

Not the type of creative charging that most of us envisioned when we got into this business!

We once had a discussion involving three attorneys and a dictionary for the proper spelling of "butt plug" -- one word, two words, or hyphenated?

I love this job sometimes. Really...

More than once I've used language taken from www.adamandeve.com to use as a description of the 'device' employed in the misconduct.

I always envisioned using the item advertisement description for the purposes of explaining the item's use and purpose. (I never got the chance to do it though, those cases always seem to plead out.)

FYI: if you're going to check the link for the material, close your door. It might be difficult to explain to any passers by.

[This message was edited by Philip D Ray on 07-31-08 at .]

Right. It's for work. Do you ready the articles, too?

Articles?� They have articles?

Usually the court of appeals will put the AKA in the style of the case on the opinion. That would have been a good one.

My favorite opinion name is Benjamin Herbert Boyle aka Mr. Whipple v. State.

Don't-squeeze-the-Charmin Mr. Whipple? That's so wrong. It's like prosecuting Mr. McFeeley from Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood.

Mr. McFeeley sounds like another aka to me.

That RJ can think up some good monikers.

Sorry to denigrate an American institution and all that, but between Mr. McFeeley and that whole weird business with the ritualized changing clothes in front of kids, I always had my doubts.

Sadly for me, Mr. McFeely (I spelled it wrong the first time) is not a made up moniker. He was an actual character on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. It gets worse. He was also known as Speedy McFeely becuase he was a mailman.

Here's the link.

MCFeely was Mr. Rogers real middle name.

Yes, and it was certainly innocent in that context.

And the actor's name was David Newell? Ummm.

Well, guess what our David's new nickname will be?

Oy vey.

Good one, Speedy.

Et tu, JB? Et tu?

Wow. Speedy is trilingual.