Review and discuss the overview of the attached case, The Night the Knight Was Banned from the Round Table (docx). It is important you begin to use the resources available to you. Go to the Lexis-Nexis library website found in the library and find one case of interest that you believe is relevant to the assigned case. Report on this to your classmates via threaded discussion.
Describe the case you selected, the specific facts of the case, and why it is important to the case study assigned to the class. When analyzing and describing the case, focus on the facts–whether they are similar or different in some detail–and the rules of law the court states apply (and/or don’t apply) to the facts at issue in the case. Pay attention to the logical reasoning–that is more critical to your understanding than the simple outcome of the case. The reasoning matters–law is not a simplistic exercise of “votes” for a party as outcome. It doesn’t work that way–it works by assessing whether the facts that occurred are the kind of facts addressed by a statute, and how the statute regulates those facts. For example, a statute is passed by a legislature after a horrible incident of 6 people dying after a drunk driving accident following a drinking contest at a bar. The law passed says, “Driving with a blood alcohol level of .08% is a misdemeanor; any driver with blood alcohol tested at .078% or higher within an hour of the accident will be presumed to have been at or above .08% at the time of the accident in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary.” That’s the statute part–it requires people to make a decision about whether they are above or below .08% if they drive (only relevant if they have had alcohol–if they haven’t had any, this doesn’t apply). A driver causes an accident and had his blood alcohol measured 57 minutes after the accident at .079%. The driver proves he had not been at any bar; he had been home, and had taken NyQuil before leaving for work. A standard dose of the type of NyQuil he took is found to be the equivalent of a 50-proof drink. The driver argued he should not have been charged under the statute because he had not been out drinking, or consuming alcoholic beverages, which is the conduct the statute was intended to regulate. He also argues that since he had just taken it immediately before getting in the car, the alcohol should not have metabolized yet at the time of the accident ten minutes later, and that his blood alcohol would actually have been increasing after the accident, not decreasing as the statute presumes.
The court notes that the statute does not require alcohol consumption to occur at a bar or social event, or that the alcohol enter the body as alcoholic beverages. The court finds that this evidence is not sufficient to overcome the legal presumption that the driver was at or above the misdemeanor level of .08%, because there was alcohol content in the NyQuil he took and there are warnings on the label about not driving. This, the driver has committed a misdemeanor crime to which this statute applies, even though the person had not been “drinking” alcoholic beverages. I hope that helps model the type of analysis applied by courts when deciding the outcome of cases, and that you should be seeking to use in assessing the cases you read for this exercise and throughout the course.
