Software Anti-Pattern: The Exception Repeater

Since I've seen this pattern several times in a software project I'm trying to maintain, I've decided to give it a name: The Exception Repeater anti-pattern. Here's a particularly succinct implementation of it, direct from the repo:

public static void ValidateData() {
  try {
     ValidateDataInner();
  } catch (Exception e) {
     throw e;
  }
}

Since I've seen this exact thing several times in the codebase today, I'm wondering if maybe it has some kind of magical benefit or side-effect that I'm not aware of. The only benefit that I can think of is that an unintelligent programmer can claim to be programming "defensively", or something like that.

So Bad It's Funny

At work I've been taking a program written by another engineer and trying to merge the functionality into a program that I've been writing. During this process, I have found some code so bad that it's both funny and depressing at the same time. Here is a great example:
[Update 10 Feb 2010: This code is C#]

public bool CheckMsgValid(byte[] _myArray, int _myIdx) {
   bool t;
   t = ((_myArray[_myIdx] & 0x80) == 0x80) ? true : false;
   return t;
}

...which is basically the long way to write:

public bool CheckMsgValid(byte[] b, int x) {
   return b[x] & 0x80 != 0 ;
}

I guess the original coder wanted to make double-sure that the two values were equal.