Matrix Defense
The ''Matrix'' defense is a legal defense based on the premise of the film franchise ''The Matrix'', in which reality is a computer generation and the real world is different from what reality is popularly perceived to be. A defendant using this defense claims that they committed a crime because they believed that they were in a simulated world (the Matrix), and not in the real world. A defendant could allege they never intended death for their victim because they believed the victim to be alive in the other reality. This is a version of the insanity defense and considered a descendant of the ''Taxi Driver'' defense of John Hinckley, one of the first defenses based on blurring reality with films. Regardless of whether the defendant believes that they were living within a simulated world, this defense has been used in cases where the accused were sent to mental-care facilities instead of prisons: * Tonda Lynn Ansley of Hamilton, Ohio, was found not guilty by reason of insanity u ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Defense (legal)
In a civil proceeding or criminal prosecution under the common law or under statute, a defendant may raise a defense (or defence) in an effort to avert civil legal liability, liability or criminal conviction. A defense is put forward by a party to defeat a suit or action brought against the party, and may be based on legal grounds or on factual claims. Besides contesting the accuracy of an allegation made against the defendant in the proceeding, the defendant may also make allegations against the prosecutor or plaintiff or raise a defense, arguing that, even if the allegations against the defendant are true, the defendant is nevertheless not liable. Acceptance of a defense by the court completely exonerates the defendant and not merely Mitigation, mitigates the liability. The defense phase of a trial occurs after the prosecution phase, that is, after the prosecution "rests". Other parts of the defense include the opening and closing arguments and the cross-examination during ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Thomas Nelson (publisher)
Thomas Nelson is a publishing firm that began in West Bow, Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1798, as the namesake of its founder. It is a subsidiary of HarperCollins, the publishing unit of News Corp. It describes itself as a "world leading publisher and provider of Christian content". Its most successful title to date is ''Heaven Is for Real''. In Canada, the Nelson imprint is used for educational publishing. In the United Kingdom, it was an independent publisher until 1962, and later became part of the educational imprint Nelson Thornes. British history Thomas Nelson Sr. founded the shop that bears his name in Edinburgh in 1798, originally as a second-hand bookshop at 2 West Bow, just off the city's Royal Mile#Lawnmarket, Lawnmarket, recognizing a ready market for inexpensive, standard editions of non-copyright works, which he attempted to satisfy by publishing reprints of classics. By 1822, the shop had moved to 9 West Bow, and a second shop had opened at 230 Royal Mile#High Stree ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Criminal Defenses
In the field of criminal law, there are a variety of conditions that will tend to negate elements of a crime (particularly the ''intent'' element), known as defenses. The label may be apt in jurisdictions where the ''accused'' may be assigned some ''burden'' before a tribunal. However, in many jurisdictions, the entire burden to prove a crime is on the ''prosecution'', which also must prove the ''absence'' of these defenses, where implicated. In other words, in many jurisdictions the absence of these so-called defenses is treated as an element of the crime. So-called defenses may provide partial or total refuge from punishment. Types of defenses in a court of law Mental disorder (insanity) Insanity or ''mental disorder'' (Australia and Canada), may negate the ''intent'' of any crime, although it pertains only to those crimes having an ''intent'' element. A variety of rules have been advanced to define what, precisely, constitutes criminal ''insanity''. The most common definiti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Twinkie Defense
"Twinkie defense" is a derisive label for an improbable legal defense. It is not a recognized legal defense in jurisprudence, but a catch-all term coined by reporters during their coverage of the trial of defendant Dan White for the murders of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. White's defense was that he suffered diminished capacity as a result of his depression, a symptom of which was a change in diet from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary foods. Contrary to common belief, White's attorneys did not argue that the Twinkies were the cause of White's actions, but that their consumption was symptomatic of his underlying depression. The product itself was only mentioned in passing during the trial. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, and served five years in prison. Origin The expression derives from the 1979 trial of Dan White, a former San Francisco police officer and firefighter who was serving ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Simulated Reality
A simulated reality is an approximation of reality created in a simulation, usually in a set of circumstances in which something is engineered to appear real when it is not. Most concepts invoking a simulated reality relate to some form of computer simulation, whether through the creation of a virtual reality that creates appearance of being in a real world, or a theoretical process like mind uploading, in which a mind could be uploaded into a computer simulation. A digital twin is a simulation of a real thing, created for purposes such as testing engineering outcomes. In fiction All fiction can be said to present a simulated reality to the reader, viewer or player. Humans purposely experience these things and enjoy them, while knowing they are not actually real. As humans only respond emotively to things we believe to be real, this phenomenon has become known as the " paradox of fiction". The idea of a " willing suspension of disbelief" was first proposed in 1817 by Samuel Ta ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Shaggy Defense
A Shaggy defense is a phrase used by commentators to describe a person denying an accusation with the simple defense of "it wasn't me", despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The phrase is derived from reggae musician Shaggy's 2000 single " It Wasn't Me", and was coined by ''Slate'' writer Josh Levin in 2008 to describe the defense tactics used by singer R. Kelly while on trial for child pornography charges. Origin " It Wasn't Me" by reggae musician Shaggy was released in September 2000 as the first single from his fifth album '' Hot Shot'', eventually reaching number 1 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 in the United States and in other countries. The lyrics of the song depict a man asking his friend what to do after his girlfriend catches him having sex with another woman. His friend's advice is to deny everything, despite clear evidence to the contrary, with the phrase "It wasn't me". On February 3, 2002, a video surfaced showing popular R&B musician R. Kelly rapin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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King Kong Defense
The Pirate Bay trial was a joint criminal and civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement of others with the torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay. The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of intellectual rights holders led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay. Swedish prosecutors filed charges on 31 January 2008 against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, who ran the site; and Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law. Some 34 cases of copyright infringements were originally listed, of which 21 were related to music files, 9 to movies, and 4 to games. One case involving music file ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Chewbacca Defense
In a jury trial, the Chewbacca defense is a legal strategy in which a criminal defense lawyer tries to confuse the jury rather than refute the case of the prosecutor. It is an intentional distraction or obfuscation. As a Chewbacca defense distracts and misleads, it is an example of a red herring. It is also an example of an irrelevant conclusion, a type of informal fallacy in which one making an argument fails to address the issue in question. Often an opposing counsel can legally Objection (United States law), object to such arguments by declaring them irrelevant, character evidence, or argumentative. The name "Chewbacca defense" comes from "Chef Aid", an episode of the American animated series ''South Park''. The episode, which premiered on October 7, 1998, satirizes the O. J. Simpson murder trial, particularly attorney Johnnie Cochran's closing argument for the defense. In the episode, a fictionalized version of Cochran bases his argument on a false premise about the 1983 fil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Affluenza
Affluenza describes the psychological and social effects of affluence. It is a portmanteau of ''wealth, affluence'' and ''influenza'', and is used most commonly by critics of consumerism. Some psychologists consider it to be a pseudo-scientific term; however, the word continues to be used in scientific literature. History The word is thought to have been first used in 1908, and to have been adopted for its most common current usage in California in 1973. It was also used by John Levy, executive director of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco in 1984 to describe the lack of motivation that could dog wealthy people. It was popularized in 1997 with a PBS documentary of the same name and the subsequent book ''Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic'' (2001, revised in 2005, 2014). These works define affluenza as "a painful, infectious disease, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more". A more info ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lee Malvo
Lee Boyd Malvo (born February 18, 1985), also known as John Lee Malvo, is a Jamaican convicted mass murderer who, along with John Allen Muhammad, committed a series of murders dubbed the D.C. sniper attacks over a three-week period in October 2002. Malvo was aged 17 during the span of the shootings. He is serving multiple life sentences at Keen Mountain Correctional Center in Virginia, a maximum security (level 4) prison. The D.C. sniper attacks were the last in a series of shootings across the United States connected to Muhammad and Malvo which began on the West Coast. Muhammad had befriended the juvenile Malvo and enlisted him in the attacks. According to Craig Cooley, one of Malvo's defense attorneys, Malvo believed Muhammad when he told him that the $10 million ransom sought from the U.S. government to stop the sniper killings would be used to establish a Utopian society for 140 homeless Black children on a Canadian compound. In 2012, Malvo claimed that Muhammad had se ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Matrix (franchise)
''The Matrix'' is an American cyberpunk media franchise consisting of four feature films, beginning with ''The Matrix'' (1999) and continuing with three sequels, ''The Matrix Reloaded'', ''The Matrix Revolutions'' (both 2003), and ''The Matrix Resurrections'' (2021). The first three films were written and directed by the Wachowskis and produced by Joel Silver. The screenplay for the fourth film was written by Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell (author), David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, was directed by Lana Wachowski, and was produced by Grant Hill (producer), Grant Hill, James McTeigue, and Lana Wachowski. The franchise is owned by Warner Bros., which distributed the films along with Village Roadshow Pictures. The latter, along with Silver Pictures, are the two production companies that worked on the first three films. The series features a cyberpunk story of the technological fall of humanity, in which the creation of artificial intelligence led the way to a race of powerful an ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of 2024, San Francisco is the List of California cities by population, fourth-most populous city in the U.S. state of California and the List of United States cities by population, 17th-most populous in the United States. San Francisco has a land area of at the upper end of the San Francisco Peninsula and is the County statistics of the United States, fifth-most densely populated U.S. county. Among U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco is ranked first by per capita income and sixth by aggregate income as of 2023. San Francisco anchors the Metropolitan statistical area#United States, 13th-most populous metropolitan statistical area in the U.S., with almost 4.6 million residents in 2023. The larger San Francisco Bay Area ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |