A convicted bank robber who appealed his case on grounds that the judge had overstepped his authority by Googling was denied his appeal today. Anthony Bari allegedly knocked over the Ridgewood Savings Bank in the Bronx in Sept. 2008 while on parole for a previous bank robbery; evidence against him included a security video, which showed the robber was wearing a yellow rain hat, similar to one found in the garage of Bari's landlord. In his sentencing Bari to three year's in jail, Judge Denny Chin noted that he had Googled rain hats to research the disguise.
Bari argued that "Chin's Googling violated federal rules that prohibit judges from serving as witnesses at trials over which they preside," the Post reports, but the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, "Common sense leads one to suppose that there is not only one type of yellow rain hat for sale...(Chin's) independent Internet search served only to confirm this common sense assumption." Judge Chin is no stranger to strange cases: he famously sentenced Bernie Madoff to 150 years in prison, ruled that calling someone gay was no longer defamation, and once dealt with a "1,784 billion, trillion dollars" lawsuit.
