Legal News

Law Blog Footnotes of the Day

By Peter Lattman

Here’s a Seventh Circuit opinion that just came down, courtesy of How Appealing. It looks like a pretty straightforward denial of a habeas petition, but here’s the opening paragraph from Judge Evans, and the first two fun-filled footnotes:

If a 42-year-old man wants to change his identity and fly through the remainder of his life under the radar screen with a fake name, what kind of name would he be likely to select? Certainly he would want a common name, like Walker, Washington, White, or Williams,* to name just a few that begin with the same letter. But Donald Calloway, the appellant in this federal habeas case, did not follow the conventional wisdom: his newly adopted name (in 1979) was Robert Ducks.** Twenty two years later, after “Robert Ducks” was indicted in federal court, “Donald Calloway” came back from the past. And it was quite a past.

* How popular are these four names? Well, the National Football League alone has 11 players named either White or Walker on current team rosters. A dozen players are named Washington. And there are 39 players with “Williams” on the back of their jerseys each weekend. See NFL.com.

** At least Donald Calloway also changed his first name, as “Donald Ducks” was apparently even too much for him. And, just to go back to the last footnote, there are no players in the NFL named either Duck or Ducks.

Law Blog readers, what do you think? Far be it from us to disagree with anyone on the Seventh Circuit, but if you’re going to go with a pseudonym, why not Robert Ducks? Strikes us that something uber-generic, like “Donald Williams” smacks of someone trying a little too hard to be anonymous, you know?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 14, 2008 (boomark / email).