After winning a jury verdict of $150,000 in a civil rights suit, Puricelli filed a petition for more than $180,000 in attorney fees for himself and his co-counsel, Theodore M. Kravitz, that was riddled with typographical and other sorts of errors.

The sloppy pleading clearly angered Senior U.S. District Judge J. William Ditter Jr., who spent the first three pages of his opinion in McKenna v. City of Philadelphia just describing the errors, adding "[sic]" after each one, and ultimately slashed the fees to about $26,000.

Among the many misspellings flagged by Ditter were "plaintf," "Philadehia," "attoreys," "reasonbale" and "Ubited States." Puricelli also wrote the phrase "mocong papers" where he clearly intended to write "moving papers."

Apparently, the mix-up in the names caused the judge to make the same mistake himself. In a second opinion handed down the same day that focused on Puricelli's post-trial motions, Ditter mistakenly referred to the defendant police officer as "Anthony Jericho."

When The Legal Intelligencer brought the mistake to the judge's attention, Ditter responded by saying: "The day I become perfect I'll have a halo and I'll grow wings and I'll fly away from here. I don't feel any wings growing on my back, so, for today, I'll be staying here."

2. the lawyer whose work is slammed seems to have a record of winning in the courtroom.  Is it really possible to have written work product that gets slammed like this, and still win??