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At the twilight of a long life of crime…

… when you have finally, at a very advanced age, been hauled into a courtroom for decades of deeply evil activity, the thing to do to finish out your incarceration-free run is to plead dire physical debility. Judge, I’m an old man! Jail would kill me! Have mercy.

The ploy frequently works. You’re surprised? UD has blogged about people – not even very old people in some cases – whose lawyers successfully convince authorities that whoops their client was just about to curtail his atrocities himself cuz of the following twelve life-threatening diseases that have suddenly engulfed him. Here’s a note, your honor, from a real live doctor I know, attesting to every one of them, and then some.

In the case of Rabbi Eliezer Berland, flight was his initial – and remarkably picaresque (if you have a free afternoon, you might enjoy following his multi-national, violent, on-the-lam itinerary) – response to some earlier charges against him (he likes to rape people). Now he’s back in court, charged with

defrauding his sick and elderly followers out of millions of shekels with miracle cures, including the administering of [Mentos] to cancer patients…

[H]undreds of people filed a police complaint against him for selling prayers and “wonder drugs” to desperate members of his community, and for promising families of handicapped individuals that their loved ones would be able to walk and families of convicted felons that their loved ones would be freed from prison.

His lawyer’s poignant account of a man diseased and in no condition to go to prison drew the following response from the judge:

Give him a Mentos.

Margaret Soltan, May 8, 2020 2:28PM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
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