Lawyers I talk to say Gu may end up with a fate that is common in knotty Chinese cases: a death sentence that is suspended (i.e., never carried out), on the basis of mental instability.
In a second decision issued Wednesday, the court sidestepped a knotty question in a case over California's attempt to cut Medicaid payment rates.
Beyond the grisly details -- and they are grisly enough for the most hardened of true-crime devotees -- the case raises knotty legal questions that some experts believe will be settled only by Germany's highest court.
The main outcome of the proposed new American law would be still more court cases, with lucratively knotty points of international jurisdiction involved.
The issue turns on how much and what kind of contact with Al Qaeda is sufficient to make someone on the fringes detainable — and, in some cases, targetable — a knotty problem in a war against a loose-knit, far-flung terrorist network.
But his two-hour forum couldn't possibly explore all of the subject's knotty complexities.
Yet the knotty social and economic problems (and, in the case of many Rohingyas, the violence) that drive migrants to flee are still there along with the pervasive corruption encouraging the people-trafficking.
Each of these is knotty enough to scupper the event on its own.
This," he says, throwing his hands around the living room of his Sydney terrace house where knotty plant roots are artfully displayed in glass cases opposite Moorish-style art deco mirrors, "is like an instant resume – it's a snapshot of who I am.
The more cerebral among you will doubtless prefer to dwell on the resonances with Beachcomber's Mr Justice Cocklecarrot and his 12 red-bearded dwarfs; and, of course, with AP Herbert's Misleading Cases, that tremendous series of fictional, challenging knotty legal conundrums involving Albert Haddock as litigant and the long-suffering Mr Justice Swallow.
