The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t break new legal ground with its recent decision in U.S. v. Deffenbaugh, which involved a man who faked his own death to avoid a court hearing. But anyone planning to similarly fake ...

Tagged with: sidebar

Coastal residents in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional district have discovered a new use for that plywood normally reserved for battening down the hatches during hurricane season: ramping up the debate during political season. Supporters of former Gov. Mark Sanford, one ...

Tagged with: sidebar

All those splashy billboards beckoning drivers on I-95 to a pyrotechnics paradise just off Exit 53 in Walterboro are at the center of a protracted lawsuit that reads like an oddball comedy. The suit pits the Fireworks Supermarket against wily ...

Tagged with: sidebar

Anyone who has wondered whether their local police department is quietly building its own Skynet to spy on residents from above with drone aircraft brought back from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq should soon have some answers. American Civil ...

Tagged with: sidebar

Charleston barbershop owner and state Rep. Robert L. Brown isn’t backing down from his fight to change an old state law that regulates hair braiding. Brown, a Democrat, is sponsoring a bill that would amend a 1976 statute so that ...

Tagged with: sidebar

Stephen Stanko was a talented, if ruthless, con man. He lured a 74-year-old man to his death by convincing him that Stanko’s father had died, and then while on the lam he secured a place to stay by convincing a ...

Tagged with: sidebar

Plowing $80 million into the construction of a new law school building might defy prevailing bear-market attitudes toward the legal profession, but the Gamecocks are no chickens. Late last month, the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees approved a ...

Tagged with: sidebar University of South Carolina

No one’s going to accuse South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean H. Toal of being a shrinking violet. She’s frank, hardnosed and, at times, downright intimidating.

Tagged with: Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal sidebar

Patricia Moore-King ran into unforeseen difficulties when she tried to open up shop offering “services as a psychic and spiritual counselor” in Chesterfield County, Va. in 2008.

Tagged with: sidebar

After being convicted of two burglaries, Willie Lee Simmons requested the chance to participate in SC STRONG, a nonprofit that provides vocational opportunities for substance abusers and ex-convicts. Simmons hoped for a probation plea bargain, and he presumably figured working ...

Tagged with: sidebar