The Knuckleheads of the Day award

Goes to Joyce Amaral, Carol Pray, and an appeals court in Massachusetts. Seems Ms. Amaral isn't happy that golf balls being hit by golfers playing the Middlebrook Country Club kept landing on her property and sued in court claiming they were a nuisance. The judges agreed with Ms. Amaral and Ms. Pray and sent the case back to a lower court for remedy.

These people are absolute nitwits all around.

1- The golf course is over 50 years old
2- The development in question is 10 years old
3- If you live next to a golf course you better expect golf balls being hit onto your property. My parents lived along the 2nd hole of the Camino Real CC in Boca Raton for 9 years. The house got hit with golf balls all the time and they only lived 50 yards off the tee.
4- There is no remedy to this with the exception of closing the golf course. Bad golf shots are going to keep coming unless you put a dome over these people's houses.
5- So eliminate the golf course and what will happen? The property values of Ms. Amaral and Ms. Pray's homes will sink like a stone in a pond.

For being absolutely absurd, all parties involved in bringing this lawsuit and handing down the verdict are today's knuckleads of the day.

Appeals Court keeps case against golf course in play
Abutters win reversal on dangers from balls
By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff July 23, 2005

Over the last seven summers, Joyce Amaral's house in Rehoboth has been deluged by a monsoon of Titleists and Top-Flites from the adjacent Middlebrook Country Club.

Balls sliced and hooked by duffers have damaged her windows and screens, dented her mother's car, and made her deck too dangerous for daytime use, she said in a civil lawsuit against the golf course. One ball hit her house with such force that it set off her burglar alarm, according to the suit.

Yesterday, the state Appeals Court ruled that Amaral was entitled to some relief.

Holding that each golf ball was, in effect, an individual trespasser on her property, the appellate court overturned a Superior Court judge's ruling that Amaral and a neighbor, Carol Pray, should have anticipated the potential nuisance that the course represented when they bought new houses near the ninth hole in the late 1990s.

In a 15-page ruling made public yesterday, the Appeals Court ruled that flying golf balls could not be considered a mere nuisance like the odor from a dump or the roar of an airport runway.

''Though no person has yet been struck by a golf ball on Amaral's property, the fear of being struck has a significant effect on Amaral's use and enjoyment of her yard," the court said, pointing out that Amaral has to restrict her son's use of the yard and that she contracts with a landscaping company whose workers wear hard hats in her yard.

The three-judge panel ordered that the case be returned to the Superior Court for an injunction barring further intrusion by the golf balls on Amaral and Pray's properties. Middlebrook's owners, Peter and Lucretia Cuppels, must now decide whether to appeal the case to the Supreme Judicial Court or come up with a solution.

''They haven't decided what they're going to do yet," said their lawyer, Michael F. Drywa Jr.