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After hearing, court rules you can't just bite off part of somebody's ear

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today upheld the prison term of a Springfield man who went berserk after his sons' basketball team lost and began a beatdown of the opposing coach that ended with him biting part of the man's left ear off.

Timothy Forbes appealed his 3-4 year prison sentence in part because the state mayhem law, under which he was convicted, refers to a person who "cuts or tears off an ear" and he said he only chomped off a part of the opposing coach's ear - which he then spit out - and did not both "cut" and "tear" off the ear.

In the sort of formal legal language for which appellate courts are known, the justices basically asked what planet Forbes was from:

Simply put, we think that interpreting "an ear" as necessarily denoting an entire ear ascribes to the word "an" a mathematical precision that was never intended. "The maxim that penal statutes are to be strictly construed does not mean that an available and sensible interpretation is to be rejected in favor of a fanciful or perverse one." Commonwealth v. Roucoulet, 413 Mass. 647, 652 (1992), quoting from Commonwealth v. Tata, 28 Mass. App. Ct. 23, 25-26 (1989) (Kaplan, J.). Certainly, we would not hesitate to affirm a mayhem conviction, for instance, where the defendant had removed all but a tiny portion of the victim's ear. At least where, as here, the evidence shows that the defendant severed a substantial portion of the victim's ear, we conclude that a jury reasonably could have concluded that the defendant's actions amounted to "cut[ting] or tear[ing] off an ear."

Just to be sure, the justices looked to see how other jurisdictions have handled the ear issue - and they found concurring ear-biting citations from a 1970 Nevada case and an 1894 case in what was then the Republic of Hawaii.

The court did give Forbes a slight legal victory in overturning his conviction for assault and battery, as basically duplicating the more serious mayhem conviction. However, since the sentence for that offense was to run concurrently with the one for mayhem, he doesn't save any time in prison.


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Comments

just plead insanity

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Whoever, with malicious intent to maim or disfigure, cuts out or maims the tongue, puts out or destroys an eye, cuts or tears off an ear, cuts, slits or mutilates the nose or lip, or cuts off or disables a limb or member, of another person

I like that it was once someone somewhere's job to think of all the ways someone could get beat the hell up

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Actually sounds like the lyrics of a Jim Croce song.

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You don't rip off his ear...
You don't tear the arm off the old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Missed in all of this is that his victim is named Jose Feliciano. So, you know, feliz navidad and shit. Here's your ear.

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year olds and this guy bites an ear off. He should get life.

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Let's not overreact to the situation and do something disproportionate to what happened.

Wait, huh?

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If he cut and tore off his nose what would happen then?

If he chopped and sliced his vestigial tail would he get prison time?

If he hacked and severed his pinky toe using nothing but one incisor would he still be doing hard time in the hooskow?

Inquiring minds really really wanna know this stuff!

http://cappyinboston.blogspot.com/

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What an angry, sick man.

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