Despite the gripping drama of shows like Law & Order and Matlock , there's a reason most people dread jury duty: real-life court proceedings are as boring as watching mushrooms fight. Usually, anyway -- every now and then, our normally mundane courtrooms will explode with Hollywood spectacle, resulting in real-world cases that seem more like the plot of a John Grisham movie:

5 The Trial for an Attempted Murder Reveals an Intricate Plot by the Victim to Get Himself Killed

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Two British teens we'll call John and Mark met in an alleyway by a Manchester mall one day in 2003. By all accounts, the two friends were tighter than stone butt cheeks, which is why everyone was surprised when Mark stabbed the everloving shit out of John in a vicious murder attempt. Investigators couldn't make any sense of the incident, least of all John, who told police so many different stories about why his friend might have tried to kill him that it began to sound like a Hollywood pitch meeting.

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"... and then twist, he thought he was murdering my evil twin and then twist,

his mom's yoga instructor was faking the coma and then twist ... "

The Plot Twist:

That's actually not too far from the truth. After being fed multiple different stories by John and spending months in the dark, prosecutors finally uncovered the monkey-jugglingly insane truth behind what happened: John had tricked Mark into trying to murder him by posing online as a middle-aged female spy in the British Secret Service, who promised Mark sex, a multimillion-dollar job, and the entire DVD set of James Bond Jr. if he could prove his willingness to kill for the organization by stabbing his friend John to death. And that's only a taste of the crazy. Not only had the 14-year-old John turned Mark's life into a Shyamalan spy thriller but he had been duping Mark for some time with other online aliases and looney-tunes schemes. Why? Because John was hopelessly in love with Mark.

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"I'm telling you: when I'm with him, I just feel the L-word."

"Lunacy?"

Before getting Mark to stab him, John romanced him vicariously through a fake Internet girlfriend named Rachel, for whom Mark fell with the intensity of Manti Te'o. John then introduced himself to Mark as the nonexistent Rachel's brother, and the two became friends. As if that weren't crazy enough, John then pretended to be a psychotic stalker named Kevin, who threatened to murder John and Rachel (who, remember, is a person who does not exist) unless Mark performed sex acts in front of a webcam, which Mark did. Finally, realizing that Mark would never love him the way he loved John's pretend sister, John cooked up the spy story -- because if you can't make someone love you, tricking them into murdering you is apparently the next best thing.