Recurring themes

Fake police officers have graced News of the Weird (most recently in 2006) for pulling motorists over for officious scoldings on traffic safety, but a March 20 stop in Boca Raton, Fla., by an imitation, off-duty sheriff’s deputy was special. He was riding with his girlfriend when he decided to stop a discourteous motorist, and when a real cop later showed up, the “deputy” was revealed to be not a cop and also not a “he.” Rachel Otto, 21, wore her hair short on top and shaved on the sides, and her outing as a woman apparently shocked the girlfriend, who had been living with Otto for a week. Police said Otto’s rap sheet included nine arrests for impersonating police officers.

¢ Wrongly convicted defendants are freed from prisons regularly now, some after many years’ incarceration, and lawsuits against the legal system that put them there are proliferating. Three men in Birmingham, England, who were recently freed after, respectively, 18, 18 and 11 years in prison for murders, were (in separate trials) awarded a total of 2.16 million British pounds (about $4.2 million), but the Court of Appeal ruled in March that they will have to give 25 percent back to the government as compensation for their “room and board,” i.e., tiny cells and prison food, during all those years.