www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,60144-2,00.html
Them: Fresh Perspectives * Today's Top 5 Stories * 31 Playing With Sounds in Your Head * 32 Makeovers Dot-Com: Check It Out * 33 California Bans E-Vote Machines * 34 NZ Volcano Scarier Than Mt. Staff Must Come Clean in Iraq Scandal * 40 Britain Launches Probe Into Iraq Abuse Photos * 41 Western Firm Pulls Staff from Yanbu; Cautions * 42 More Breaking News * 43 Wire Service Photo Gallery Tech Jobs Partner 44 Today's the Day. McFall believes the district attorney is simply using the teen to get a badly written law revised. While Assistant District Attorney Richard Sitzman said last year about Robertson's story, "if this is fiction, then it goes too far," he 45 admitted in court (PDF) that he had trouble with the law he was using to charge Robertson. It has caused me problems analytically from the day I first read it," he said. He even 46 likened the statute (PDF) to something out of George Orwell's book 1984. Legislators are very hesitant to assess damages on their own work. Without public outcry, a law would never be repealed and reintroduced with new language, absent this kind of public concern," McFall said. In the meantime, Robertson's family has posted a $10,000 bond to release him on bail. And they've had to refinance their house and shell out tens of thousands of dollars for his defense. Kathy Robertson has spent the last year and a half working hard to defend her son. She set up a 47 website about the issue and just this week she uncovered evidence that may bolster his case. Despite the fact that her son has always maintained that he didn't create the story "Evacuation Plans," but merely added to a paragraph that was already written, no one has ever come forward to admit writing the first paragraph. But this week, Kathy Robertson suddenly got the idea to run a Google search on the first sentence of the story. The search results revealed the exact paragraph buried deep in a 48 page of the University of Arkansas website. A second search on HotBot revealed 49 another university website with the same paragraph. After a bit of sleuthing, she discovered that the paragraph comes on a CD-ROM that comes with a 50 textbook for learning Adobe PageMaker. The paragraph is the sample text used in a template for creating ads in PageMaker. The text describes evacuation plans for taking shelter in case of a hurricane. Kathy Robertson says she's willing to bet that someone in her son's Web design class had loaded the CD-ROM onto the computer he used to write the story. She's hoping that this bit of evidence may prove that her son's story was an inspired piece of fiction. That may or may not be enough to finally get the case dismissed. McFall says she's worried that if the case does go to trial, a jury's response would be unpredictable. End of story Send e-mail icon Have a comment on this article? Your use of this website constitutes acceptance of the Lycos 73 Privacy Policy and 74 Terms & Conditions Note: You are reading this message either because you can not see our css files (served from Akamai for performance reasons), or because you do not have a standards-compliant browser.
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