Or, “People Who Had Salt Rubbed In Their Wounds, Then Got Billed For The Salt.”
I’m going to try my hand at writing a Cracked article, and I have the idea to write about people who went through what the old saying hints at. Here in this thread, I’m just looking for suggestions - I’ll do the research and write the article.
So far I have two ideas:
Baby Bou Bou: Toddler was sleeping in his crib when a Haversham County (Georgia) SWAT team executed a no-knock drug raid. A flash-bang grenade was thrown into his crib; it detonated and blew his chest and face apart. The police and the county steadfastly refused to pay even a dime toward his medical bills, which reached into the millions. Family had to go to court to get money out of them.
Just about anybody who’s ever had their home searched by the cops, warrant or not: Cops have been known to tear homes and businesses apart, looking for drugs or whatever. In some jurisdictions, the homeowner is on the hook for cleanup whether evidence was found or not.
Police believed a suspect to be hiding contraband in a part of their anatomy.
Suspect was taken by force to a medical facility, where an invasive search was done against the suspect’s will.
Suspect was then billed by the medical facility for the procedure.
Generally, the suspect has been able to recover quite a bit from the police and the doctors in question, both because it’s a big medical ethics violation to perform an invasive search by force and against the will of the patient when there’s no medical rationale for doing so, and because there’s a perfectly peaceful alternative, which is to lock the suspect up and make them poop in a bucket until whatever you think they might be hiding has passed.
What about Richard Jewell? The guy who was wrongly blamed for the 1996 Olympic bombing. Not sure if he really had to pay financially for it, but he was put through a lot of shit.
The classic one would be Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, Nov 9, 1938. Nazis burned over 100 synagouges in Germany and smashec thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, in retaliation for the killing of a German embassy secretary in Paris, France.
The Jewish community as a whole was ‘fined’ $400 million for the damage done to their own churches & businesses. Also, they were prohibited from filing insurance claims, and were not permitted to re-open the businesses.
Another that’s not an individual but a collective: To receive diplomatic recognition of its independence in the early 1800’s, the nation of Haiti was forced to pay reparations to France for the loss and damage of French property including the “value” of its own population’s liberation from slavery, at what is understood by historians to have been a wildly inflated estimate. To cover the schedule of payments, being cash short, they in turn had to get credit from France itself on terms that made the cost of repayment compound in a vicious cycle, that took into the 20th century to be finally done with.
Billy Dale was the head of the White House travel office. The Clintons, including HRC, wanted to get rid of him, so they pushed the FBI to investigate and he was indicted for embezzlement. The jury acquitted in less than two hours, but the legal fees ruined him.
Have you written before? Is it true the editors create the headline, so sometimes it doesn’t exactly match what you wrote?
And please please PLEASE, since its in a list form, ensure that the #1 item is actually the worst or most outrageous of the list. Too many times have I read a list where the most shocking or whatever isn’t the last item. That bothers me to no end
There have been a number of cases of police with a search warrant misreading the warrant and going to the wrong address-- either getting the number wrong, or doing something like going to N Main St, instead of S Main St, or Main St, instead of Main Dr. They then force their way into the home, damaging the door, toss the house, occasionally firing on the owner if he happens to have a gun and gets it, thinking he is being robbed, and not realizing it’s the police.
If you Google “Police search wrong address,” you’ll get any number of cases. I leave you to pick the most egregious.
Also, in Indiana, you will have your property forfeited to the police if you are caught dealing drugs. However, some people have had homes and cars seized on the suspicion of dealing and the charges were dismissed. I remember one story where the guy was arrested as part of a sting on people who bought stuff that COULD be used to grow pot indoors. This guy was growing tomatoes in his basement, so he was buying lights, and a certain fertilizer. He lost his house.
People in this situation have to sue to get their homes and cars back. Sometimes they’ve been sold already, and so they can only sue for the value of the property. In other words, having charges dismissed does not automatically result in the return of forfeited property.
Again, there are lots of cases, and I leave it to you to pick the most egregious.
In the end, Jewell received financial settlements from a number of entities whom he accused of defaming him. Most of the amounts are undisclosed, but one was for $500K.
So I don’t think he fits in this thread; He was surely wronged, but then the wrongdoers paid him.
Adding to the tales of preschool witchhunts already mentioned here, I suggest a real witchhunt, namely, the one that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.
19 people were hanged and one was pressed to death. The families of all of the victims were billed for the prisoners’ board and lodging in the jail. There were also several people who were accused but had not been brought to trial before the hysteria collapsed. They, too, were billed for their jail confinement. Because the jailers refused to let them free until their bills had been settled, several of them languished in cells for years after the trials even though their innocence was undoubted.
On the subject of warrantless ass searches by the border patrol…I was trying to find out when they were allowed to execute searches without a hint of probable cause. Including now electronic devices.
But “Obama and the border patrol” doesnt exactly return any hits of him expanding their powers.
The linked article indicates the family has $3.6 million coming to them. The only specific example provided of someone getting “Salt Rubbed In Their Wounds, Then [Getting] Billed For The Salt” ends with a massive payment to the woundee.
