The number of state and federal wiretaps jumped 34 percent last year, to a total of 3,194 intercepts, according to the latest report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

California led the way, as state judges approved 657 wiretap applications. For all wiretaps, drug investigations and not anti-terrorism accounted for the greatest number of wiretaps. On average, wiretaps were in place for 40 days. Some of them could resemble vacuum cleaners: in a Southern California drug investigation, for instance, authorities reported scooping up 74,715 messages from cell phones.

A deadline is a deadline and late is late, as the firm Castle-Rose Inc. has now learned the hard way.

Through a series of unfortunate events, a Castle-Rose messenger turned in the company's bid for an Army Corps of Engineers project in Bainbridge, Washington six minutes late. That's 360 seconds.

Here's what happened in Seattle on July 7, 2010. At 2 p.m., the assigned bid deadline, a Corps official left the lobby of the agency's building. Then, a messenger from Castle-Rose the company's proposal for the solicitation. A security guard gave the messenger a four-digit telephone number to call using the lobby telephone. The messenge misinterpreted this number as a room number, proceeded to enter the elevator, and was stopped by the security guard. The messenger tried to climb up the stairs and was stopped again.  The security guard then called the Corps official and told her that a representative from Castle-Rose had arrived in the main lobby with a proposal. It was 2:06 p.m., six minutes late.

Cutting it fine, Castle-Rose said the company should have been granted until 2:00:059; the time by which, the company said, its messenger had entered the building.

On Tuesday, U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Charles Lettow rejected Castle-Rose's complaint that it was unfairly treated.

Federal prison inmate Owen Silvious had a beef with Snapple, makers of iced tea and such. You know Snapple, they're the ones that proclaim the drinks are made from "the best stuff on earth."

So Mr. Silvious, currently incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C. after pleading guilty to five counts of mail fraud, said he was expecting nothing but natural ingredients when he bought some Snapple drinks. Instead, he said he discovered after the fact that the drinks were made from high fructose corn syrup.

The 72-year-old inmate sued, asking for $225,000. But this is not the standard inmate lawsuit. Mr. Silvious, rather cleverly, in the mind of Suits & Sentences, said he would split any damage award with District of Columbia branches of the Salvation Army, United Way, the American Red Cross and various homeless and consumer protection funds.

And the reason he didn't file the lawsuit earlier, he said, was that his incarceration prevented him from learning about the Snapple ingredients.

Doesn't matter. On Monday, U.S. District Judge John Bates dismissed the lawsuit for having missed the statute of limitations that began tolling once Mr. Silvious began drinking the sugary Snapples back at least in 2003.

The law of karma is indelible but not always subject to the tools of traditional statutory interpretation.

Which is a backdoor way to make note of a FishbowlDC item today about blogger Ana Marie Cox, the former Wonkette editor who has been MIA for a while. Cox is a smart, funny and interesting writer. She seems very cool. She has also built her reputation on snark, the pitiless excavation of other people's foibles: in particular, the foibles of D.C. media and political personalities.

So what can one make of the FishbowlDC statement that Ms. Cox is now "coping and dealing with personal and family issues"? The issues themselves are left unspecified, but are said to be "serious." In other words, presumably embarrassing if they were to be made public.

What would Wonkette, in the early days when Ms. Cox was doing everything she could to attract attention, have done with such partial information? Would that ambitious site have dug deeper, brushed aside the fuddy duddy protectionism of the traditional media and laid bare the personal details of a D.C. media celebrity? Would that young, eager-for-web-visits site have followed the Graham Greene novelistic admonition that "there is a sliver of ice in the heart of a writer."?

Or, would the young Ana Marie Cox have chosen sympathetic forbearance, sacrificed some potential web traffic and compassionately turned her gaze away from the personal travails of a woman very much like, say, the early middle-aged Ana Marie Cox.

Former White House chief of staff John Sununu had somewhat of a reputation as a tough, blunt-speaking guy. Turns out, though he may have been a little too much of a pussycat in his business dealings.

(A journalism digression: For at least a while, the USA Today site on Monday illustrated the story about Sununu with a picture of his son, former Republican Sen. John Sununu, Jr. See the flub here.)

Returning to the law: On Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed a long-running lawsuit filed by Sununu and a business partner against Philippine Air Lines. Sununu and partner Victor H. Frank. Jr. claimed the airline had stiffed him on a $520,000 fee. Judge Lamberth, a Suits & Sentences favorite for his frankly expressed views, is worth quoting a length:

"To grant PAL’s summary judgment motion is not to condone its conduct. The airline can rightly be accused of stinginess for enforcing the formalistic terms of the contract in spite of the plaintiffs’ earnest efforts on its behalf. PAL’s shifting explanations for why it would not pay Sununu and Frank do not reflect well on the airline’s approach to business dealings. But because the airline ultimately had no obligation to pay...PAL may have violated Sununu and Frank’s trust, but it did not violate the law.

For their part, Sununu and Frank seem to have done their best to serve their client, but they made a reckless bet by trusting PAL. They were accustomed to handshake deals in which personal relationships count for more than legal documents, so they made little effort to put their understandings with PAL on paper. When they ran into a client who didn’t play by the same rules, they paid the price.

The lesson is one that should be taught in law and business schools across America: When in doubt, write it out."

Washington Post columnist Colbert King has prevailed in a defamation lawsuit filed by a prison inmate who claims King falsely linked him to a jailhouse murder and unfairly compared him to an al Qaeda terrorist.

In a 14-page opinion issued Friday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed the $10 million-plus lawsuit filed by James H. Carpenter, Jr.

The 32-year-old Carpenter is serving a life sentence at the Federal Correctional Complex in Coleman, Fla. His complaint arose from three columns written in  2009 concerning the death of a 29-year-old District of Columbia native named Keith Barnes. Barnes was murdered by other inmates while in federal prison.

In one column, King cited courts documents as showing that  "Carpenter wrote several letters to Barnes telling him he would be killed if he continued to cooperate" with police. King further suggested that the death of Barnes raised questions about whether prison officials were ready to handle dangerous al Qaeda prisoners.

Carpenter claimed that the columns were slanted to make him seem more dangerous than international terrorists, and further that the harmful columns would endanger his appeals because "the judges of the court system read the Washington Post."

Judge Jackson, without divulging her own newspaper reading habits, went through Carpenter's claim piece by piece and dismissed it, in part, because she said did not see a plausible claim that the statements in questions were false, defamatory and unprotected. A quick check of the PACER database suggests that this was the first defamation lawsuit filed against the Pulitzer Prize-winning King.

Toni Patricia Irons Burley had a bad day in court this week, having six straight lawsuits tossed by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon.

In one suit, Ms. Burley had charged the United States Government, President Barack Obama and others with "violating my rights, raping me, illegal wiretapping and illegal divices [sic] place upon me to do harm and stalking." In another, she charged Obama et. al. with "removing the act of statement and violation of freedom under God the plakes [sic] out of the court rooms In God we trust violation and destroying what our government in the 1600 placed upon us in history."

In another she...

etcetera.

Judge Leon dismissed and dismissed and dismissed and ...

Some lawsuits are built on such a strange set of facts, judges feel moved to comment upon the strangeness. The case of Rafat Azzam v. Rightway Development is one such action.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell set it up this way:

"'A man’s house is his castle,' even if others do not perceive it as such. In this unusual case, Plaintiff Rafat Azzam alleges that one day he returned to his house to find that his house and its contents had vanished entirely."

Nicely done, writing-wise. The judge draws the reader in, immediately. Then, the judge elaborates:

"The plaintiff alleges that a few months after purchasing a new house in the District of Columbia...on October 21, 2010, Azzam went to check on his property. Much to his surprise and dismay, he arrived to find that the House, along with all of its contents, had vanished. A local mail carrier told Azzam that a work crew had razed the House around the first week of October 2010. Id. On the fence around the empty lot where Azzam’s house once stood, there was a sign that read: 'Rightway Development.'"

This sounds like a job for the Washington Post Metro section to follow up on; there's got to be a decent feature story here.

Two McClatchy stories explore the enduring problem of post-trial delays in military courts. Using the case of Marine Gunnery Sgt. Brian Foster as a jumping off point, one story digs into the broader appellate delay problem that has plagued courts for years, while the other profiles Foster in greater depth.

Famed law professor and prolific writer Cass Sunstein, he of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School, has now been sued for what is apparently the first time. It didn't last long.

Sunstein currently heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It was in that capacity that he was named in a suit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Big league stuff, right? Especially since, according to a PACER search, Professor Sunstein has not previously been a named party in a federal lawsuit.

The opening brief by plaintiff Mireille Torjman goes on for 61 pages, with exhibits. Here's a taste:

"This case is about electronic harassment, torture behind the spying surveillance, civil rights violations, privacy, communications technology and crimes against humanity, in use by the U.S. Intelligence Community...plaintiff has been impeded for 5 years in numerous ways consciously and 3 unconsciously, by the public and the uses of Synthetic Telepathy Remote Viewing Pscyhotronics Weapon of Mass Destruction."

So it's like that.

On Thursday, calling these and myriad other claims "flimsier than doubtful," U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle dismissed the suit.