34 Of The Most Surprising Loopholes That Got Cases Instantly Dismissed

There was one guy who owed $464 million in bond and his lawyers said he couldn’t pay it and didn’t have the money to pay it. He then went on to say he did in fact have the money but didn’t want to pay it so they appealed hoping to lower it. The day of the deadline, a court announced they’d be lowering the bond to $175 million. It was a crazy loophole, he escaped consequences.

I got in a no injury car accident, gave the cops my insurance which had both my name and my dad's name. I'm a male with a name that is normally a females name. Cop wrote the ticket to my dad because he assumed who I was by names on the insurance. When I went to court to pay the fine, the judge told me I couldn't represent my dad. When I explained that he was living very far away from the accident and I was the driver, the judge said well you have no ticket, and your dad obviously wasn't the driver, so case dismissed.

From LegalEagle , not a loophole but more a grievous malpractice:

Some lawyers tried to use ChatGPT to write their brief. The language model hallucinated and invented court cases and references. They filed it anyway.

Opposing party candidly asked the judge : "We don’t seem to be able to find the mentioned cases in any of the legal databases. Could they please provide sources?"

Judge frowned. Lawyers sweated , tried to play dumb and asked for time while they used again ChatGPT to write the fake cases. Judge was not amused. They got fined and humiliated.

I'm not a lawyer, but this was a fun one to watch:

Someone received a speeding ticket on Main Street in Ann Arbor. He proves that 85% of drivers on that road drive faster than the speed limit and argues that the limit was improperly set under Michigan's anti speed trap law. Judge agrees and ticket is thrown out.

If everyone speeds, nobody does!

Not me, but a professor I had, who specialized on advocacy for victims of human trafficking (basically, helping victims of trafficking avoid deportation).

A salon was raided in connection to a suspected human trafficking ring. The tip turned out to be good, multiple people were arrested, and several victims were taken into custody.

Among them was a 4 year old boy. None of the victims knew him, "he helped clean the salon." Traffickers wouldn't fess up as to where he came from. *The kid didn't know his own name, where he was from, where his parents were, or where they were.* When the judge asked the kid for his name, he replied "Spiderman!" When they asked for his *real* name, he told them "Peter Parker!" Yeah, you get the idea.... anyway, prosecution wanted him gone because he was in the US illegally. Not sure where prosecution thought he'd get sent, but whatever.

Now here's a neat thing.... there's a federal statute on refugee eligibility. This particular statute hadn't been cited in over 60 years, but for all intents and purposes was still good law. The statute on question basically says, "if a victim of human trafficking is an unaccompanied minor is under X age and does not know their country of origin, they are to be granted asylum immediately, no court discretion." Now I have to emphasize, this law hadn't been used in literal DECADES, and was effectively forgotten by courts and legislature as a past relic that somehow slipped through immigration reforms over the years. But it was still valid.

My professor intended to cite this statute. The prosecutor was terrified of creating new case law, and offered to drop charges if this statute wouldn't get brought up. Professor agreed, bc client's interests.

In a strange twist of fate, the prosecutor died, and the newly assigned prosecutor said he would not honor any preexisting deals. Prof is like, "fine, let's make some case law!" New prosecutor panics and asks to go back to the original deal, which is accepted.

I suppose it's not a loophole, but very interesting IMO.

Anti LGBT laws in Hungary missed a comma, which changed the whole meaning. The intent was that all books with a gay character should be wrapped in foil and sold separately from other books. The actual law was that if the books are sold separately from other books, they should be wrapped. Book store was fined, they went to court and win, their huge fine was dismissed .

Not a loophole, but a fun one just the same.

The Defense witness destroyed my case. Destroyed it. I was going to lose.

I had just one question:

"Didn't you offer to sell your testimony to my client?"

Answer: "Yes, but we never came to an agreement."

We settled in the hall after the Defense attorney quickly asked for a recess.

I racked up parking tickets in law school, only to find out that the district had changed but the signs were never removed. The street behind the school was in a different district-one with no time limit on parking. The neighbors didn’t want students parking for hours on end so they treated it as de facto timed parking.

I defeated the tickets but only after the contentious hearing where the hearing office asked me why I thought it was ok to park wherever I wanted despite the signs. I said the signs don’t matter if they’re not legal and he said enforcement (meter maids) go by the signs, not the map. I asked if I could just put up signs wherever I wanted to not have people park and they would enforce it? He didn’t have answer for that one…

It really bothered me that the school made a big deal about getting a dispensation on parking time during exams, because the exams were an hour longer than you could park.

Heard of at least one case where the defendant was charged with carrying a loaded firearm without a license, but the count had to be dismissed because it turns out the dumba*s had loaded it with the wrong caliber bullet. The police lab tried repeatedly to get the gun to fire in the range using the defendant's bullets, but even they couldn't make it work. So technically the firearm didn't count as "loaded" under the statute. It wasn't quite case dismissed, because there was a lesser charge that still applied to an unloaded firearm, but it was a much less severe charge.

Not sure if that's a "loophole," but it's one of the funnier and more harmless get-out-of-jail-free cards I've seen.

IANAL but two come to mind.

For a period of time in my state if you got a speeding ticket you could have a hearing and request the radar technician to testify that the equipment had been calibrated correctly. Given that there were only two technicians qualified in the state they basically never showed up, and the ticket would get thrown out.

Another - a local cop got charged for catching the wrong size fish, basically poaching. Since he lied to the game officer in his statement, all prior convictions that relied on his testimony became easy appeal cases.

Criminal defendants charged with stealing an item must be charged with stealing an item FROM someone. That someone must be a legal entity.

I once represented a guy who was charged with stealing dog food. He was homeless and trying to feed his dog. Needless to say, I was sympathetic, so I was willing to pull something of a dirty trick for him.

I queued him up for trial. As soon as the first witness was sworn in, I moved to dismiss. The entity he was charged with stealing from? “Wal Mart.” That is not a legal entity. I think the real name was Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. or something.

Case immediately dismissed. Since a witness had been sworn in, double jeopardy prevented them from trying him again.

Marvel successfully argued that mutants are not people so X-men action figures get a cheaper tariff.

Still in law school but I'm amazed at how few loopholes there are; I'm always on the lookout but there's usually some catch-all, some provision, some exception, some countervailing doctrine that prevents it. The closest thing I've found to a clear loophole is that some items are exempted from the list of what can be seized to satisfy a judgment against you, but without specifying a maximum value. Like under NY's CPLR 5205, even though exempt books can't exceed $500 in value, "religious texts" have no such limit, so theoretically, if you invested all your money in expensive rare bibles, they couldn't be taken no matter what.

Friend was pulled over for expired plates driving his Mom’s car. Got a ticket. Friend went to court, tried to argue his case, but was told he can plead guilty or innocent, and no deal on a lesser charge was offered.
So he pled innocent, and went to trial. (Side note: this guy is brilliant. Studied physics in college, worked with reactors for a bunch of years, then gave up his high income job to go to law school.)

In court during the short trial, the friend argued his ticket for expired plates is a tax violation, rather than a moving violation, and no one can be held liable for another person not paying their taxes. Somehow the judge agreed. Tossed the ticket, and thereby forced the district attorney to cancel the tickets of several other people who received tickets for similar violations.

I was told law makers were forced to rewrite the law 6 months later.

Wild loopholes aren't really a thing, but what is a thing that I've seen a lot is judges knowing absolutely NOTHING about a particular area and being convinced to make a blatantly wrong decision by a quack expert because they don't understand the expertise of the actual, real qualified expert and therefore cannot be appropriately convinced by it.

To give a general example of where this type of thing comes up, quack experts have caused judges to send people to prison for serious crimes because they present bunk statistics that sound really convincing that the chance of this person being innocent is like 0.000001%, and the judge (or jury) doesn't understand statistics so they're convinced by that.

Not a lawyer but I once got a ticket for having my dog off leash at a park in Denver while the park rangers let the other offender go with a warning because they felt bad the dog only had 3 legs. I successfully argued that my rights had been violated under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment that requires law enforcement to provide a reliable reason for treating similarly situated people differently. We both had dogs, both off leash, in the same park, at the same time, stopped by the same officers in a single interaction. The law does not exempt 3 legged dogs from being on a leash so they were forced to throw my ticket out.

Not a lawyer, but in my court case my attacker talked and talked and talked for over 36 hours combined until the judge was just fed up and dismissed it all. So, I guess if you just make the judge bored enough, you win.

I got the physical evidence (a bag of d***s) thrown out because the officer reached into my client's pocket before patting the outside first. Because that the was the only evidence that my client committed a crime, the prosecutor was forced to dismiss the entire case.

IANAL but in college we would have bonfire parties in the woods. I was friends with 2 other guys and we were all Eagle Scouts, they were stoners I was not.  So the 2 stoners get caught hot boxing their car in the school parking garage, cop searches and pulls out my Machete from the previous weeks bonfire. Stoned out of their minds and freaking out they immediately tell the cops it's mine not theirs (fair enough).  I get a summons to Mickey Mouse Court (college disciplinary board) for violating handbook rule x.x.yz. 

 Well I look up the rule and it says no knives, guns or martial arts weapons in the dorms.  They basically said sign here and write a 5 page essay about why you follow the rules. I said no, I didn't violate the rule, it was never in the dorms. They replied the parking garage counts as the dorms. I didn't take it in the garage. My dorm is a mile away. I park close to my dorm. They said the parking lot adjacent counts. I'm like okay I park in auxiliary since there is 1 pace for every 3 residents adjacent to the building.  To which they replied that lot (300 yds from the dorms) still counts as the dorms. So I replied that's not a weapon it's a tool you buy it at home depot and the lawn crews on campus are using them. They told me to sign and I flat out refused. 

 They gave up and said I could go. I said where's my tool? They initially said it had been destroyed. I'm like WTF you owe me a machete. Then turns out campus PD had it. They were surprisingly more chill about it than admin when I talked about Scouts.

I am a lawyer. I specialize in tax and litigation (civil, not criminal tax). The biggest loophole is money. Can you pay your lawyer to be as creative and annoying as you can. It's literally that simple.

Bog down the court with motion practice, beg for continuances, and throw absolutely everything possible you can because you can. You won't see a Public Defender or a Low Income Clinic attorney do this. There is simply not enough of them.