In Ontario, Canada, the Superior Court of Justice recently decided a case in which two street drug dealers fought over a $5 million winning lottery ticket. The judge remarked that if the ticket were a child and the two parties were vying for custody, he would have found them both unfit and brought in social services. But it was a property case and someone had to win.
Here were the facts: in 2006, after a busy day “conducting illegal drugs transactions”, Daniel “Ears” Carley was driven to a shop from which he purchased 12 lottery tickets. When he got back in the car, Paul Miller, the driver and a childhood friend, scratched one of the tickets to discover it was a winner. After Ears banked the $5 million, Miller sued, arguing that he had given $10 to Ears just before the key purchase and said, “Here, buy me one too”.
The judge censured both the claimant and defendant. Denying that Miller had been manipulated out of the money by a superior intellect, the judge said, “I do not agree that Ears was the brains of this duo”. He castigated Miller as a “horrible witness” and noted that although Ears had “many credibility issues”, he ultimately seemed to have the more believable account (that he had bought all the tickets with his own money).
Judicial sympathy was reserved for only one witness: Ears’s mother. On the night of the win, “true to her British heritage” (she was born in England) she left the celebrations at 7pm to watch Coronation Street. “There was a limit” the judge dryly noted, “to the disruption that she would allow $5 million to make in her life.”
The judge ruled that Miller’s story of having given $10 for a ticket was a “brazen fabrication” and that Ears was entitled to keep all the winnings. At least, what was left of them. He had been spending it at the rate of $20,000 a week for three years.
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It was not the first time a court has been challenged by a lottery. In Spain, Juan Antonio Roca was arrested for taking systematic bribes as head of urban planning in Marbella. His net salary was less than €150,000 a year, yet when he was arrested his property included two huge Andalucian estates, luxury hotels, three palaces, beachside housing developments, a private plane and artworks worth a combined $2.4 billion.
Asked by a judge to explain this wealth, Roca said he had won the lottery 80 times. The prosecution noted that the chances of that were one in 43 quadrillion. In such circumstances, even the best defence lawyer might falter a little when beginning a speech, “Improbable as it might seem . . . ”
Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University. He is the co-author of English Law, published by Routledge-Cavendish