No good deed goes unpunished, or so goes the saying. Such was the case with Lisa Torti, who is being sued for pulling a now-paralyzed friend from the wreckage of a Los Angeles car accident in 2004. The victim’s lawyers claim the Good Samaritan bumbled the rescue and caused injury by yanking her friend “like a rag doll” to safety.

But Torti — now a 30-year-old interior designer from Las Vegas — said she thought she had seen smoke and feared the car would explode. She claims she was only trying to help her friend, Alexandra Van Horn, and her own life has been adversely affected by the incident.

“I know [Van Horn] has a lot of financial issues and her life has changed,” she said. “But it’s not my fault. I can’t be angry at her, only the path she has chosen to take. I can only pray it helps her.” “I don’t have any more fight left,” Torti told ABCNews.com, choking back tears. “It’s really emotional.” The California Supreme Court ruled this week that Van Horn may sue Torti for allegedly causing her friend’s paralysis. The case — the first of its kind — challenges the state’s liability shield law that protects people who give emergency assistance.

The court ruled 4-3 that only those administering medical care have legal immunity, but not those like Torti, who merely take rescue action. The justices said that the perceived danger to Van Horn in the wrecked car was not “medical.”

Tough call. Now you know why many people are disinclined to help others.

You could already be a winner — if you weren’t going to jail.

That’s the bad news 61 fugitives got after being lured to a suburban hotel with news they had won a $1,000 gift card and the chance to take home a big-screen TV. Earlier this month, people wanted on outstanding warrants got a letter in the mail from “Shoptastic Solutions” — Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s fictitious marketing outfit — promising prizes and no gimmicks.

All they had to do was check the enclosed scratch-off ticket to see if they had won — which, of course, they all did. The “winners” were told to call in their shopper number — which actually was their warrant number — to schedule an appointment to complete a shopping survey and pick up their prize. At a hotel near Midway Airport, an undercover officer in a funny hat shot off streamers as the winners walked in. While they filled out the survey, sheriff’s police — hiding in closets — popped out with zip-tie handcuffs and the big surprise.

Dart said he got a kick out of the bust.

“We tried to tap in to the Christmas spirit and throw a big dose of the Grinch on top of it,” Dart said. “The Grinch definitely struck here, and the Grinch had a lot of fun. The Grinch will return, probably in a different way.” The sheriff said most of the bad guys and girls got a good laugh at the clever bust, too. “One guy in particular came up to me and told me this was the best one ever. I got the impression this wasn’t his first time,” Dart said. The 61 offenders arrested were wanted on crimes ranging from aggravated driving under the influence to failing to pay child support.

Now that’s just deceitful!

The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives. The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home. But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General “Wild Bill” Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname “Old Blood and Guts”.

His book, “Target Patton”, contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton’s Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch. Mr Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general. Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph that when he spoke to Mr Bazata: “He was struggling with himself, all these killings he had done. He confessed to me that he had caused the accident, that he was ordered to do so by Wild Bill Donovan.