In 2010, Christian Robinson applied for a job as a chef at a Las Vegas hotel — and he didn’t get the job because there was a warrant out for his arrest. As it turned out, a guy named Michael Cagle stole his identity, Denver’s ABC affiliate explains. Robinson was erroneously saddled with Cagle’s felony drug charges, and lost out on the job he should’ve gotten.

Flummoxed, Robinson jetted off to mile-high Denver, Colorado where the charges were filed. Resolving the mix-up should have been easy, right? Robinson didn’t look the least bit like Cagle. He even offered up his fingerprints for comparison. But all the officers could see was a pair of wrists in need of cuffing.

After a 12-day stint in the pokey, Robinson found himself standing before a judge. There he discovered something interesting: one of the Cagle’s legs had a distinctive Scooby-Doo tattoo. Robinson smartly surmised that baring his thighs might sway authorities in his favor. So in a last-ditch attempt to quash all this Scooby-Dooby Doody, he dropped his pants in the middle of court. Lo and behold, there wasn’t a cartoon canine in sight. The judge had no choice but to let him go.

Because Denver cops had screwed the pooch big time, the city had to make amends. Government officials offered Robinson $88,530, which The Denver Post confirms that Robinson accepted.

The only thing worse than getting erroneously imprisoned is having it happen twice (or never getting exonerated the first time, but you get the point). Just ask Santiago Rivera, who had the dubious honor of getting confused with the same drunk driver twice in 20 years.

In all fairness, there were some jarring coincidences that made arresting Rivera seem justified. The Los Angeles Times reports that Rivera had the same first name, last name, birthday, and basic physical stature as the drunken driver cops were after. They didn’t share a middle name, but “wait, stop, I’m a tiny bit different from the suspect,” doesn’t sound like a winning defense.

Rivera’s first jail stay occurred in 1989 and lasted a week. Thankfully, he and his sloshed doppelganger didn’t have the same hands because fingerprint records saved his bacon. Upon release, Rivera received a valuable parting gift: documentation of his innocence. Then a bunch of stuff happened and it was suddenly the year 2009. By then, Rivera had lost track of his exculpatory letter. Guess how that turned out.

Or don’t guess, since you already know the answer. Without his paperwork, the yoyo-inmate hybrid asked law enforcement to check his claims. Officers couldn’t be bothered, and Rivera sat in jail for a month. This time he sued for damages. But an appeals court rebuffed Rivera, using the argument that the officers reasonably believed Rivera was, um, Rivera. A partly dissenting judge noted, however, that declining to check whether your prisoner’s innocent seems like a pretty bad idea.

Nurses see more than their fair share of death, and all that bucket-kicking can take a real mental toll. It’s vital, then, to have a strong coping strategy to avoid drowning in tears and defibrillators. Some nurses, for instance employ morbid jokes, which can work beautifully if everyone knows you’re joking. Otherwise, things can get very grim very fast. Case in point: Jani Adams.

In 1980, Jani Adams worked as a night shift nurse for Las Vegas’s Sunrise Hospital. A dabbler in the dark side of humor, she called herself the “Angel of Death” and facetiously took bets on when certain patients would pass away, according to People magazine. While that would be way awkward for a patient to overhear, Adams’ fellow nurses generally played along with her jests. But not everyone got the joke.

When Nurse Barbara Farro got bumped to Adams’ shift, she bristled at her colleagues’ seemingly blithe approach to death. One of Adams’ patients had spent the past three months battling liver failure, The Chicago Tribune reports, and was now on his last legs. Realizing there was little she could do, Adams decreased the oxygen being pumped into his system and played cards with coworkers as the patient slipped into eternal repose.

A flabbergasted Farro contacted police. A media circus ensued in which Adams was pilloried as a callous predator. The Death Angel was indicted for murder — only to be swiftly vindicated once medical findings established that the patient was irreversibly ill.  

For something so humorless, misfortune has a funny way of sneaking up on people. One minute you could be happily smoking eclairs, and the next you’re surrounded by loaded firearms. Crazy, right?  Even crazier is if the gun brigade shows up because international authorities think you kidnapped your own children. It sounds far-fetched, and yet that totally happened back in 2002.

As CBS News explains, Florida resident Nona Cason was driving her son and daughter to therapy when out of nowhere police cornered her and drew their weapons. Not eager to become a crimson bullet box, Cason obeyed their commands. Before she knew it, she had a six-day stint in jail, and her children were in foster care. Cason’s crime: being confused with someone else.

French and American law enforcement believed Cason was really Nadine Tretiakoff, a French national who had absconded with her two children in 1996. Tretiakoff’s distraught ex-husband, Pierre Fourcade wanted his children back and was convinced authorities had found them. Fourcade was so sure that during court proceedings he looked Cason right in the face and claimed she was his former wife of 20 years. Even so, the facts didn’t add up.

Fourcade didn’t recognize Cason’s son as his. What’s more, as USA Today points out, Cason had birth certificates and other documentation that showed her children weren’t French. But ultimately DNA testing proved Cason’s case. And after weeks of separation, she got her babies back.

It was 1999, a simpler time when the world still gushed over Monica Lewinski’s blue dress and the Y2K bug prepared to unleash its impotence on the planet. The major event in Mohammad Javed’s world, however, involved going gaga over a lady. In a BBC interview he recalls that the magic happened during a trip to Pakistan. While visiting relatives with his mother, he met a woman named Mobina. The two nearly broke the ground falling for each other.

Because Javed lived in India, he and Mobina largely communicated from afar.  They exchanged pages-long love letters that Javed’s friends helped him translate into Mobina’s native tongue. Javed poured his paychecks into long-distance phone calls. But after three years of this saccharine sweetness, Cupid got a little too aggressive and started stabbing Javed with an arrow.

That assault came in the form India’s government, which somehow surmised that Javed wasn’t some love-struck Romeo, but a filthy terrorist “waging war against India.”  In 2002 government goons nabbed Javed and interrogated him Gitmo-style. They peppered him with bruises, issued threats, and repeatedly dunked his head in water. The CIA would have been proud.

Despite the evidence consisting of nada and bupkis, Javed and the friends who translated his letters got convicted of terrorism. Javed would languish behind bars while his father went broke trying to free him. Finally, after eleven and a half years, a judge ultimately deemed Javed’s detention frothingly stupid and released him. It’s so nice when love stories have a happy ending.