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Faking Death to Avoid Court . . . .

By Adam Levin, Benjamin Goldberg, and Garrett Nail

Steven Haun was facing charges related to exposing himself to two girls.  So he did what any industrious, boat-owning criminal defendant with a snowball's chance in hell of winning his case would do: he took some unsuspecting friends out on the boat, had them tow him on a raft with a 100 foot line in the middle of the night in the Gulf of Mexico, shed his life vest to trick the friends into thinking he had fallen from the raft, swam to a nearby island where he had stashed a jet-ski, and went on the lam for a bit.  His stunt caused his friends to call authorities who eventually called the Coast Guard to assist in a search and rescue operation.  It's a federal crime to "knowingly and willfully communicate a false distress message to the Coast Guard or cause the Coast Guard to attempt to save lives and property when no help is needed...continue to full post

Full post as published by Southern Criminal Law and Justice on August 08, 2007 (boomark / email).