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TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS: ZANY, WACKY PRISONER LAWSUITS
Shortly after being made a jail trusty, inmate Ross Chadwell tried to escape the Benton County, Arkansas, Prison. He was soon captured and punished for his actions. He then filed a lawsuit against both the county and Sheriff Andy Lee, claiming civil rights violations. Chadwell accused Sheriff Lee of acting “recklessly” by making him a trusty and therefore putting him in a position that made it possible for him to attempt escape.
Randy Kraft, a convicted serial killer, filed a $60 million defamation lawsuit against Warner Books and the author of the book Angel of Darkness. Kraft, a death-row inmate convicted of the sexual torture and murder of sixteen men, claimed the book cast him in an unfair light by portraying him as a “sick, twisted” man.
ON THE CUTTING EDGE
A convicted criminal being escorted to jail in St. Petersburg, Florida, somehow managed to escape and go on the lam. During his escape, however, he suffered several deep cuts to his feet, but even with the loss of blood the criminal was able to vanish into thin air, and the authorities didn’t have a clue as to his whereabouts. They got their break from the most unexpected of places — the local hospital. The authorities at the hospital got suspicious of their most recent patient — not because of his wounds but because of his words. When asked to fill out the standard hospital forms, on the line about the cause of the injury our escapee wrote, “Escape from jail.”
PUSH ME, PULL YOU
A number of bank robberies are hampered because of holdup notes that include the robber’s name and phone number, the lack of a weapon, an ineffective disguise, and the like, and usually these robbers don’t make it out the door. But in the case of one aspiring bank robber, he didn’t even make it in the door. Employees of the Durham, North Carolina, Federal Savings Bank became frightened when they saw a man in a sweatshirt with the hood pulled tightly over his face pounding loudly on the front door. Why couldn’t he get in — was the door locked? Nope. The man was trying to push the door open, not having noticed the PULL sign above the handle. The unidentified man was linked to another attempted robbery in Durham. Yep, you guessed it — same MO. The crook failed at that robbery attempt, too, when he again attempted to push open a pull door. The push robber probably attributed his failure to a loose hinge on the door. (Insert your own loose-hinge joke here.)
THE FIRST SIGN OF STUPIDITY
A young entrepreneur in Baltimore, Maryland, looking to generate more sales, put up a sign announcing his wares on the side of a newspaper box. Two plainclothes police officers saw the unlawful advertisement and approached the man, asking if he had posted the sign. “Sure,” he said. “It’s the only way I can get people to stop.” The sign in question offered the sale of ten-dollar bags of marijuana.
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