Don’t Bank On It

The Kazakhstan central bank has misspelled the word ‘bank’ on its new notes. However, the bank still plans to put the misprinted notes into circulation and then gradually withdraw them to correct the spelling, and this move has drawn the ire of the Central Asian state’s politicians who urged the bank to abandon the notes altogether.

Language is a contentious issue in Kazakhstan. Kazakhs were encouraged to speak Russian (which is written in Cyrillic script) during Soviet times, but since independence in 1991, the country has seen the Kazakh language as a national symbol. The Kazakh word for bank is the Cyrillic form of ‘bank’. On the new note, the word was written with an alternate Kazakh form of the letter K, which has a slightly different pronunciation.

Crash Dieting

An Australian inmate who used laxatives to shed 31 pounds (14 kg) so he could squeeze through a hole in a prison wall had been frustrated by the indefinite sentence he was serving. Robert Cole, 37, spent three days on the run from police in January after slipping his 123-pound frame through a 15-centimetre-wide hole he had chiselled in the window frame of a hospital wing at Sydney’s Long Bay Jail for three weeks using a butter knife.

New South Wales state District Court Judge Roger Dive sentenced Cole to two years and two months’ imprisonment after he pleaded guilty to a charge of escape. The sentence was backdated to his recapture. Cole has ‘put on a lot of weight’ since he was recaptured and has been sent to a different prison.

Gender Bender

A judge in California has dismissed an indecent exposure charge against a woman accused of disrobing in front of a 14-year-old boy, saying the law only applies to men. Superior Court Judge Robert W Armstrong said that the law only mentions someone who ‘exposes his person’ and is therefore gender specific. However, prosecutor Alison N Norton said the decision to throw out the case will be appealed because another section of state law says that ‘words used in the masculine gender include the feminine and neuter’.

‘Get Out of Jail’ Card Turned Down

In Singapore, it is automatic and we do not need a court order to free a prisoner after he has served his sentence; in the Philippines, an application to Court is required (see President’s Message, SLG October 2006), but in Germany, prisoners who are sometimes let out before they complete their sentence, do not necessarily want to leave. A 59-year-old German, Gerold H, who has spent the last 34 years in jail after having been convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1972 when the area was part of communist East Germany, has turned down offers to be let out .

‘We can’t do anything if someone sentenced to life in prison doesn’t want to leave,’ said a spokesman for the Brandenburg State Justice Ministry. German prisoners have no obligation to agree to leave jail before their sentences have been completed.