Warning: This post discusses violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.
Every courtroom drama has its twists and turns, but sometimes it’s not the law or the evidence that tips the scales — it’s one jaw-droppingly dumb moment that seals a case’s fate. Recently, u/LordofDiacord asked lawyers to share the most ridiculous things that won or lost them a case, and the responses range from bizarre reenactments gone wrong to courtroom confessions that no one saw coming. Here are the wildest stories of legal self-sabotage that lawyers swear happened:
1.“I had a fairly simple assault trial. The facts were pretty basic: a guy experiencing homelessness was told to leave by security and was ushered away. He got upset and hit the security guard. We had some cellphone footage that showed this, but ultimately, the key moment wasn’t clear. It could have been argued that the security guard touched him first. Defense counsel asked the defendant a few questions, then went in front of the jury and asked him to essentially position her like the security guard was standing and reenact what happened. They more or less agreed that she should be standing about arm’s length away and pointing. She then asked, ‘And what did you do?’ He looked right at her and slugged her right in the mouth. Not even a ‘gentle’ reenactment tap, but fully committed to trying to knock her out. Her lip was bleeding, and she looked shocked, like she was fully unprepared for it, before sitting down.”
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“It was then my turn to cross-examine: ‘Sir, just to confirm — you hit the security guard just like that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Up until that time, did the security guard ever touch you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Nothing further, judge.’
I didn’t even get out of the courthouse parking lot before I got called back for the verdict.”
2.“I was on jury duty a few years ago for a domestic abuse case. The ‘dumb’ moment was when the accused was asked if he had sent threatening messages to his former partner’s new boyfriend. He said no, and the defense went with, ‘Well, the number on the phone is unknown, so it could literally be anybody, couldn’t it?’ Well, the new boyfriend said, ‘…Actually, I know it was him.’ The defense scoffed at that idea. ‘And how did you know it was him?’ The new boyfriend said, ‘…Well, it was via WhatsApp, where you can click on the number and it’ll show you the profile of who it is, even if you don’t have their number. When I did that, it showed the defendant’s name.’ The defense was like, ‘…Wait…what?’ with the judge checking, ‘Do you still have the messages so you can show me this?’ Defense: ‘Wait…NO.'”
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“The new boyfriend: ‘Yep, here you go.’ It all happened in the span of like five minutes and was hilarious. The defendant didn’t seem that fussed, but his defense lawyer was like, ‘We’re so screwed.’
The fellow was later charged with various things, including beating his former partner, and was sent to jail.”
3.“I was a public defender in my first felony trial: a meth trafficking case where they caught the whole exchange on video, including my client’s alleged face and his license plate as the exchange took place in his car. When he was arrested the next day, he still had the marked bills in his wallet. All I could argue was reasonable doubt — ‘probably’ isn’t enough. Because of his record, he was facing 20 years in prison. After 10 minutes out, the jury came back and asked if they could see my client’s teeth. In the video, he had a bad case of meth mouth, but he hadn’t testified, so the jury didn’t get a chance to look at his mouth in person. The judge said, ‘Sorry, the proof was closed.’ They came back not guilty five minutes later.”
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“I spoke to the foreman after. He said they were pretty certain it was him, but his teeth were so distinctive that they wanted to see them to be certain. I asked, ‘What about the license plate and marked bills?’
His brow furrowed. ‘That actually didn’t come up back there…but…yeah, I guess it was definitely him. Should we tell the judge?’
‘Uh, it’s too late, it’s over.'”
4.“The case was about a vicious fight outside a bar. The accused was charged with biting the victim’s nose off. The only witness was an older man, who said he saw the two fighting in a crowd of brawlers from across the street. The defense cross went something like: Q: ‘I see you’re wearing glasses here. Are you nearsighted?’ A: ‘Yes.’ Q: ‘From the police report, it says you were not wearing your glasses that night.’ A: ‘Yes, I ran out of my house without them when I heard the riot.’ Q: ‘It was dark and foggy that night, there was only a single light above the bar, and you were 100 feet away. Is that correct?’ A: ‘Yes.’ Q: ‘So, you admit you are nearsighted, and the visibility conditions were not good. You could not have seen exactly what happened 100 feet away from you, correct?’ A: ‘Yes, but…’ Q: ‘Please just answer the question.’ A: ‘Yes.’ Here, the lawyer ought to have sat down.”
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“Instead, they opened their mouth and asked the fatal question.
Q: ‘So, given you admit you could not have seen exactly what happened, why did you testify it was my client who bit off the victim’s nose? It could have been any one of those fighting.’
A: ‘Because later, your client ran right past me, and spat a severed nose onto my shoe.’
The latter bit had not been in the police report and was not mentioned on direct.”
5.“I do technical work for lawyers. I’m going to generalize this excessively because it’s a real case. I did some data recovery analysis of a dashcam from a company vehicle involved in a very serious accident. The driver claimed not to be at fault. After doing recovery on the SD card from the camera, I found a video of a company manager sitting at the wheel in the company garage, weeks after the accident, while the vehicle was supposed to be quarantined as evidence. He was on the phone with someone, receiving instructions regarding the dashcam. We could hear him say, ‘No, I already pushed it.’ Except that he had pushed the red ‘record incident manually’ button and recorded himself tampering with evidence. This was presented in pre-trial negotiations, and the case settled immediately in favor of my client.”
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6.“At one point, I was interning for a family law attorney. He was in the middle of this divorce case, and I sat in on client meetings and mediation with the other party. They were discussing custody and weren’t able to come to an agreement, so I proposed a potential agreement to our client. After the other attorney talked it over with their client, they accepted. We left, and I was riding high on the thrill of resolving things. Then, the lawyer I was interning with told me that the custody schedule I proposed was identical to one that had come up earlier in the negotiation. The only reason they accepted this time was because both parties perceived me as a sort of neutral third party, so they believed the compromise was fairer than when it had been proposed by one of them.”
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7.“I was on jury duty for a case involving a father and son who got into a physical argument. Both adults. The son pressed charges for simple assault. There was plenty of evidence to acquit, as it sounded like mutual combat. The son was kind of a jerk and was egging him on, pushing, etc., up until the punch that busted his lip and led to the cops being called. We were ready to acquit until the dad took the stand. Virtually the first thing out of his mouth: ‘Oh yeah, I whooped his butt good!’ With plenty of detail! His lawyer and the judge both visibly shook their heads. Had to convict.”
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8.“My uncle went to watch my dad — a defense lawyer — in court on two occasions. Both times, my uncle was identified by a witness as the suspect. Dismissed and dismissed.”
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9.“I had a client who had stolen pills from a hospital when I was working in the clinic at law school. The DA sent me security camera footage that showed her, 10 feet from a camera, looking around, and shoveling pills into her pocket. I asked my professor how to approach it, and he suggested showing her the video. I did that, and her response was, ‘So do you think I have a case?’ She ended up magically finding money for a non-public defender, firing me, and getting a few years in jail.”
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10.“I had a client charged with illegally camping on public land —aka being unhoused in public. I moved for a dismissal at the first appearance based on a lack of probable cause. The municipal code defined camping as sleeping outdoors between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. I pointed out that the police citation showed that they ticketed my client at 8:30 p.m.”
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11.“I heard this one from a friend defending a client charged with beating a man to death with a bat. The cops found him shortly after, a block away from the crime scene, holding a bat and wearing a coat, both covered in the victim’s blood. He argued at trial that he was walking down the street, minding his own business, when another man offered him a free coat if he would hold his bat for a few minutes. He said he accepted the bat and put the coat on. He then proceeded to wait for the mysterious man to return, when the cops found him. The jury was not out long before returning a guilty verdict.”
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12.“I’m a contract attorney in the entertainment world. My client, a writer and director, called one day and said, ‘Hey, what legally constitutes a contract?’ I explained the basics: an offer of terms, acceptance of terms, consideration of value, mutual agreement, capacity to agree, and the offer has to be legal. I heard silence and then, ‘Oh no. We may have an issue.’ He explained that he was in Vegas and got to talking to this guy. They were having fun, getting goofy, and the guy pitched him a story. He loved it. Long story short, he wrote up an agreement that if he used this idea, the guy would get either 25 percent of the profits or a part in the production. He signed it, the guy signed it, and the bartender witnessed it. I laughed.”
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“He said, ‘But I love the idea. I’ve spent the night writing it out. How screwed am I?’ I asked: ‘Who took the signed paper?’ The guy did. ‘Were you drunk?’ Stone cold sober. ‘Was the guy drunk?’ He never saw him drink.
I said the risk factor was low but possible. He was a bit upset, asking if he could change the story and get away with it. I said that was a question for his copyright attorney.
Offhandedly, I asked where he was, when, and if he knew what the bartender looked like. He gave me all that information. He was going to ask his copyright lawyer since he had a good start on the idea.
A few days later, I was able to track down the bartender. The guy called me back. I explained who I was and asked if he remembered the scenario I had laid out. He started laughing and finally responded, ‘Yeah, I remember those two — they were wasted out of their minds, doing bumps at my bar, which is why I came over. Then they wrote up that stuff and asked me to sign it. I did. But we had to ask them to leave when the guy pulled out a pipe.’
I asked if he knew what happened to the paper they signed. He said, ‘I threw that stuff away — it was all gibberish and illegible anyway. I just pretended to sign it with a straw because it was the only way they’d leave…but hey, your guy left me a 75 percent tip.’
I hung up and texted my client that I had taken care of it. His response was praying hands and ‘3k cover your time?’ The dude got an option with the idea he and his bar buddy cooked up, but it never got produced.”
13.“A lady worked for a missile factory making missiles for the military. She had a bogus bodily injury claim from a fender bender and was being treated with some questionable medical practices that get paid out of lawsuit proceeds, so we were already suspicious. Come to find out, her treatment records showed her being ‘treated’ at the exact times she was logged into the secure missile facility monitored by the US government. On cross-examination, I showed her both sets of records and asked her to pick which ones were more likely to be true — the missile factory with the secure facility or the medical practice trying to get paid from her lawsuit. She picked the missile factory. She wound up losing and owing my client $230,000 in legal fees, which her plaintiff’s law firm had to partially cover. They don’t put that possibility on the billboards, y’all.”
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14.“I was interning for a public defender. Statutory rape case — 30-year-old defendant accused of having sex with a teenager. Gross, but everyone’s entitled to a fair trial. A paralegal gave me a recording of a phone call from the jail where the defendant was being held, and asked me to transcribe it. Apparently, the prosecution had just entered it into evidence. I listened to the phone call. It was the defendant calling the teenager he’d been accused of having sex with from jail to tell her how much he couldn’t wait to have sex with her once he got out of jail. He explicitly admitted to the accusations and made it clear it hadn’t been a one-off but rather a repeat occurrence, something that had, up to that point, been in contention. It turned into a quick plea deal.”
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15.“It was a class action data breach case. We were suing a company that had accidentally emailed thousands of their customers’ info to a group of scammers. Ridiculous negligence, complete disregard for even the most basic data protection — bunch of arrogant, rich jerks. Due to some procedural weirdness, we had to prove that our class representative specifically had monetary damages from the data breach, which would normally be a huge problem because actual provable damages from data breaches are extremely rare. But we had an unusual class representative: He’d gotten the boilerplate breach notice and absolutely freaked out about it. Panic attacks, medical problems, and he lost his job. So in a one-in-a-million situation, we had an opportunity to actually hold these people accountable for damaging tens of thousands of people.”
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“The defendants got our representative’s employee file in discovery and found he had been fired for a third strike of missing work — he had been home with a panic attack.
But they wanted to show that he had skipped work for his daughter’s school field trip, which had actually been his second strike. So we showed up to a hearing with an elementary school field trip schedule, which allowed us to recover millions of dollars for the class.”
16.“I saw a lawyer argue a case as follows. Judge: ‘How does your client plead?’ Lawyer: ‘Not guilty, your honor.’ Judge: ‘On what grounds?’ Lawyer: ‘The description of the suspect in the police report mentions the suspect having one leg, your honor.’ Judge, rifling through papers: ‘Yes, I see that written here.’ Lawyer: ‘Well, my client has two legs, your honor.’ Judge, visibly baffled: ‘Case dismissed.’ To answer some questions, this was not during a trial like those on TV. This occurred in a lower-level court — think the court that handles parking tickets and public intoxication charges — where the stakes were lower and most people didn’t have attorneys. As a result, a lot of the usual court formalities were disposed of to make things easier and more efficient. I am aware that in a formal trial this would never happen, but here I doubt more discovery was done beyond reading the police report.”
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Have you ever witnessed something in court — or even just in a workplace dispute — that left you completely stunned? Share your story in the comments! Or, you can fill out the anonymous form below. Your response could be featured in a future BuzzFeed post.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
