Judge cancels parking ticket over poor comma placement

(Editor’s note: This was one of the top viewed stories of 2015. We’re rerunning it as part of a look back at the articles that captivated our readers the most.)

Perhaps you have experienced the impatience of a judge as you try to wriggle out of a parking or speeding ticket.

So consider the victory recently when an Ohio woman persuaded an appeals court to throw out her conviction because of a missing comma in a city ordinance. The recent case led copy editors and punctuation perfectionists to rejoice on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Washington Post urged readers to “take a minute today and celebrate Judge Robert A. Hendrickson and the 12th District Court of Appeals in Ohio.” The Post’s headline called the ruling “a victory for punctuation, sanity.”