Re: john doe is the stupedest dork in the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


"Butter Pants" <butterpantsforever@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:lkn552586op32fk5o4pfleoineaqp0abeh@xxxxxxxxxx
i just plonk him. :))))

Q] From Kevin Webster: "I have spent two hours searching the Net for
information about the expressions John Doe and Jane Doe that American
authorities use for people who cannot be identified. US courts also allow
the names to be used by people who do not want to provide their real names
in certain cases. Was there a real original John Doe and what was famous
enough about him?"

[A] There's a lot we don't know about the origins of these names-and others
that are sometimes used-but it seems certain that there never was a real
John Doe.

The name is known from the eighteenth century-the best-known early example
is in Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws of England of
1765-69, but it is certainly older-the Oxford English Dictionary editors
tell me that they've recently found it in a work of 1659: "To prosecute the
suit, to witt John Doe And Richard Roe". Suggestions I've seen that it dates
back to Edward III's reign in the fourteenth century seem wide of the mark,
though.

It was used in a rather complicated and long since obsolete legal process
called an action of ejectment, which would be brought by a wrongfully
dispossessed owner who was trying to get his land back. For arcane legal
reasons, landowners who wanted to establish their rightful titles would use
fictitious tenants in the ejectment action. In order to find whether this
imaginary tenant had a right to be in possession, the court had first to
establish that the supposed landlord was actually the owner, which settled
the true reason for the action. This highly technical procedure was done
away with in Britain by an Act of Parliament in 1852 but survives in
American states.

We know that it became standard by the time of Blackstone to use the name of
John Doe for the fictitious plaintiff and Richard Roe for the equally unreal
defendant in such cases. We have no idea where these names came from.
However, it does seem likely that the first names were chosen from the most
common personal names then in use (John as a generic name also appeared in
John Company, a nickname for the East India Company; much more recently,
John Q Citizen and John Q Public are American names for the man in the
street, based on the same idea). The surnames were both associated with deer
(a doe being a female deer, as you will remember from The Sound of Music,
and roe is a European deer species), but how they came to be used isn't
known.

These weren't the only names. John Stiles and Richard Miles were-and still
can be-used for the third and fourth participants in an action. Another,
long since obsolete, was John Nokes (originally John-a-nokes, a medieval
name meaning John of the oak). Jane Doe (or Jane Roe) is a much more recent
introduction, for a woman whose real name is unknown or withheld for some
reason; these are obvious enough extensions from their male equivalents.
(The most famous example is in the abortion-rights case of Roe v Wade in
1973.) She can also be called Mary Major in American federal cases, but the
origin of this is totally obscure.


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