Today I want to tell you an interesting story from legal practice, when a rather long term of imprisonment literally depended on the Pythagorean theorem. In March 2005, in New York, at the intersection of West 40th Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan, a certain James Robbins was arrested for selling illegal substances.
All would be fine, but it turned out that the severity of the crime is increasing, because the trade was carried out less than 1000 feet from the nearest school - Holy Cross School, located on West 43rd Street.
However, this was the position of the prosecution, the suspect's lawyers were of a completely different opinion. Take a look at the map:
The lawyers reasoned as follows: in order to directly walk from the place of detention to the entrance to the school, you need to walk along 8th Avenue, and then turn onto 43rd West. Total on the map is about 350 meters, which translated into bourgeois units is approximately 1160 feet.
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