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"Natasha Foster, from the Ballymoney Road in the Co Antrim town, was said by her defence to be "a woman scorned" when she appeared before Antrim Crown Court on Friday. Her lawyer Michael Smith told Judge Desmond Marrinan that the false accusation had been made out of "anger and revenge". He explained that Foster had desperately wanted to get back with a former lover and had consensual sex with him. But he later texted her saying that he was not interested in getting back into a relationship. The lawyer told the court: "After he sent the text, she was distraught and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." He further revealed that Foster later went to her doctor and admitted that she was a "compulsive liar" and that she was prescribed medication."

A Cobb Superior Court judge Friday found that Mye Brindle, a former housekeeper of Waffle House Chairman Joe Rogers, violated his privacy when she unlawfully recorded video of them engaging in a sex act at his home. Rogers' attorneys hope the findings result in the dismissal of a sexual abuse case Brindle brought against Rogers. For the past nine months, attorneys for Rogers have tried to gather more information about Brindle's recording and whether her own lawyers, David Cohen and John Butters, were involved in helping to make it. Cobb Superior Court Judge Robert Leonard found that in June 2012, Cohe and Butters sent their client, Brindle, to a private investigator's office, who ordered Brindle a "spy camera," which she used to make a video in Roger's bedroom without his consent.

QUEBEC CITY - QUEBEC CITY - A New Brunswick woman whom police say falsely claimed that two black men raped her at knifepoint, triggering a major police investigation, was found fit to stand trial Tuesday. Vanessa Roussel, 21, was charged with criminal mischief after undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. She was freed on $7,000 bail. Roussel is accused of contacting authorities to say she had been raped in a wooded area in Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse, near Quebec City, last month. Police uncovered inconsistencies in her story and turned their investigation towards Roussel last week. If convicted, Roussel faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Her lawyer says she is bipolar, has been seeing a psychiatrist for some time and had talked about suicide.

Investigators will lie, grill for hours on end and withhold exonerating evidence - in effect do anything - to extract a confession from a suspect they have pegged for a crime, a 1994 parolee seeking a retrial to clear his name in the 1963 kidnap-murder of a Saitama Prefecture girl said Thursday in Tokyo. Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, Kazuo Ishikawa, who appeared with his lawyer, Taketoshi Nakayama, pointed to discrepancies in the kanji used in an apparent ransom demand for ¥200,000 and an earlier document he wrote and also alleged that the state looked to him as a usual suspect because of his roots in Japan's former outcast class known as the "burakumin." He continues to claim he is innocent.

A Norwegian woman has been sentenced to a year and a half in prison after she admitted to falsely claiming to have been raped. The 37-year-old woman's lawyer, Linda Ellefsen Eide, said that the penalty was "too high", stressing the serious impact it would have on the woman's children. But Rudolf Christoffersen, the prosecutor in the case, said it was important for the courts to deal stiffly with such false accusations.

It was a frighteningly close call for Charles Tubbins. The 23-year-old Buffalo man was already charged with murder and indicted by a grand jury for a crime he did not commit. All that was required for a wholesale miscarriage of justice was for the plea negotiations to begin, presenting Tubbins with the horrifying options of standing trial or admitting to a crime he didn't commit in hopes of a lesser sentence. It didn't come to that because DNA evidence found at the crime scene exonerated Tubbins and implicated another man, Ahkeem R. Huffman. To his credit, Erie County District Attorney Frank A. Sedita moved quickly to dismiss the charges, but the case raises the same issues that have led to lengthy prison sentences for other innocent people in Erie County - issues of which law enforcement and the State Legislature are fully aware, but haven't seen fit to address. Tubbins was ensnared by the same human error that put Anthony Capozzi in prison for rapes he did not commit: witness misidentification. Eyewitness testimony was the only evidence against Tubbins, who, his lawyer noted, has no prior criminal convictions, no history of violence, no prior felony or misdemeanor.

Frank Lee Smith died of cancer on death row, just months before DNA exonerated him of raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl in Fort Lauderdale. Now, more than 13 years later, his family's civil lawsuit against the Broward Sheriff's Office and two detectives accused of framing him has finally been settled. Smith's death made him a national symbol because it was the first case in the U.S. that scientifically proved an innocent man had died in prison for a crime he didn't commit. But the financial settlement reached with the Sheriff's Office - on behalf of the agency and retired detectives Richard Scheff and Philip Amabile - is much less than the millions awarded in Broward's other notorious wrongful conviction cases. The civil suit was recently settled for just $340,000 - including attorney fees and legal costs, lawyers Michael Wrubel and James Green told the Sun Sentinel. They filed the lawsuit on behalf of Smith's closest surviving relative, his half-sister Virginia Smith, of Sunrise.

A 20-year-old woman who faked being raped by a stranger at the University of California Santa Cruz pleaded "no contest" Thursday to filing a false police report. UC Santa Barbara student Morgan Triplett did not appear in Santa Cruz County Court as her lawyer changed her plea from "not guilty" to "no contest." As part of the plea deal, Triplett must write a letter of apology to UC Santa Cruz, serve 60 days in a jail work release program, volunteer 200 hours of community service, and undergo 60 days of mental health therapy, and serve three years probation.

North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation and its insurers have agreed to pay $12.475 million to two innocent men who spent a total of 31 years behind bars. The state agreed to pay $7.85 million to settle the state lawsuit filed by Floyd Brown, a mentally disabled man locked up for 14 years in a psychiatric hospital based on what his lawyers said was a false confession created out of whole cloth by an SBI agent. Brown has also reached a separate settlement with Anson County, whose sheriff's deputies helped investigate the case. A federal judge has sealed the Anson County settlement; North Carolina law requires that all such court settlements be public records.

A teenager who spent months behind bars wrongly accused of rape after a DNA blunder has spoken of his 'relief, anger and disgust' after the charge was dropped. Adam Scott, 19, was due to stand trial next month in connection with a sex attack on a woman at Plant Hill Park in Blackley. The M.E.N. revealed yesterday how his DNA - taken in connection with a separate matter - had contaminated a sample from the victim while being processed at a laboratory run by LGC Forensics. Mr Scott, from Truro in Cornwall, is now considering taking legal action - and his lawyers are calling for a public inquiry into the blunder, which could lead to other rape and murder cases being reopened.

Original Article09/13/2013 A Wymore man falsely accused of rape will appeal the dismissal of his lawsuit against Gage County and several of its deputies, his lawyer said Friday. _____, 50, sued the county and law enforcement officials over his 2...