Monday, January 28, 2008

Too clever for his own good

The bizarre-criminal-of-the-day award goes to Amr Mohsen, an incredibly brilliant electrical engineer and inventor working in Silicon Valley (in much the same specialty I plan to), who apparently never noticed when the time came to stop inventing.

According to Wikipedia, one of Mohsen's business partners started a lawsuit with a third party, regarding one of Mohsen's patents. In order to help his case, Mohsen:
...forged a notebook in order to make the patent case stronger. When suspicions were raised, he staged a break-in of his own car to get rid of the evidence, resulting in charges of obstruction of justice. Trying to avoid this, he attempted to flee the country, only to be caught with an illegal passport and a pile of cash. While in jail for this offense, he was recorded offering money to intimidate witnesses and kill the judge. In order to fight these charges, he tried to show psychological problems, but left a trail of evidence of his research into this defense, and how it might be done. He was charged with attempting to delay a federal trial by feigning incompetency, and convicted anyway. According to the lawyers concerned, the original notebooks were not needed for the trial. The patent filing date, which was not in dispute, would have sufficed.

Just incredible.

No comments: