3

A State Legislator Was Charged With Sexual Abuse For Having Sex With His Aging Wife

In May of 2014, Iowa State Representative Henry Rayhons visited his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife Donna at the nursing home where she lived. According to him, she was upset because she'd been moved from a private to a shared room earlier that day, and he spent his visit calming her with hand-holding and prayer. Her new roommate had a different interpretation of the evening's events, claiming that Henry entered the room, closed the privacy curtain, had sex with Donna, and then exited into the hallway. A security tape showed him tossing a pair of panties into a hamper, and his semen was later identified in her bed. Normally, what goes on in the marital bed is between a couple and their gimp, but Donna's doctor had previously directed Rayhons to cease sexual activity, having judged that she lacked the mental capacity to consent. A few weeks later, Donna Rayhons passed away, and Henry Rayhons was arrested immediately after her funeral for third-degree sexual abuse.

2

Attorney-Client Privilege Is Great ... Until An Innocent Man Spends Life In Prison Because Of It

In 1982, Andrew Wilson shot and killed a security guard while robbing a Chicago McDonald's, because people who have a good sense of risk versus reward don't hold up drive-thrus in the first place. Fortunately for him, eyewitnesses identified the killer as a man named Alton Logan, who was sentenced to life in prison. It's not like things totally worked out for Wilson, as he was being held for killing two police officers in an apparently unrelated incident at the time. But he just didn't need that on top of everything else, you know?

Illinois Department of CorrectionsPictured: Logan (Left) looking absolutely nothing like Wilson (Right)

Now, Wilson had admitted as much to his two lawyers, secure in the knowledge that attorney-client privilege prevented them from telling anyone. The attorneys attended Logan's sentencing, reasoning that if the falsely accused man were sentenced to death for the crime, they'd be free to violate privilege in order to save a man's life. But no such luck. For the first time in history, it was a bad thing that an innocent man was not sentenced to die.

1

Medical Researchers Sometimes Deny People Lifesaving Treatment In The Name of Science

With any new drug, there's a testing phase that usually consists of clinical trials, wherein one group is given the real medication while another is given a placebo that does nothing. Now, here's where things get complicated: Western standards of care prohibit anything but the approved treatment for HIV-positive pregnant women, even in the context of a clinical trial. So U.S. researchers instead take their trials to places like Malawi, reasoning that many women there wouldn't receive any treatment otherwise, and we kind of have to do trials to figure out if these drugs work on pregnant women.

But it doesn't feel entirely moral to deny effective, established treatments to such vulnerable populations, especially when we refuse to deny those treatments to more, uh .... "Western" patients. But then again, there might be an even more effective treatment out there, and we have no way of finding out besides putting those extremely vulnerable people at risk in the first place.

aryfahmed/Adobe StockThis positive involves a lot of negatives.

To further complicate matters, Malawi has made some giant leaps in providing care to HIV-positive pregnant women in the last decade. In 2011, the nation's Ministry of Health formally mandated approved treatment for every HIV-positive pregnant woman, resulting in a 748 percent increase in Malawian women receiving treatment. So by participating in "cutting-edge" U.S. studies, Malawian women might receive inferior treatment when compared with the state-sponsored care now available to them. This is but another chapter in the long history of friction between medical science and brown people -- one that illustrates that while the person in the white coat might have the best interests of humanity at heart, that doesn't necessarily mean yours specifically.

Justin Krez is a vagrant who is alternatively writing or day-drinking in a P.F. Chang's. You can't find him on Twitter, but you might find him meditating in a cardboard box. Michael Battaglino is a new contributor to Cracked.com. Be sure to check out some of his other work if you enjoyed this article. A.P. Anderson is a freelance editor and comedy writer from Athens, GA. He once sold a potato to Michael Stipe. Find him on Twitter: @Breezus_H

That last one there was like a much more complicated version of Dallas Buyers Club.

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