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South Carolina Woman Jailed After Failing To Return Movie Rented Nine Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "Could you imagine being arrested for failing to return a movie you rented 9-years earlier? Well that's just what happened to one South Carolina woman. 'According to a Feb 13 arrest report, 27-year-old Kayla Finley rented Monster-in-Law in 2005 from now defunct video store Dalton video. The woman failed to return the video within the 72 hour rental limit, eventually leading up to her arrest 9 years later.'"
a movie you renter 9-years earlier?
I think that statement is worthy of jail time as well.
I thought you couldn't be arrested for owing debt? Wasn't that the point of credit scores and bankruptcy laws?
She will need to look up the laws in her state but here in Florida the statute of limitations is 5 years for a written contract. This should be easy to make go away.
I returned a tape, that old bowling movie KingPins to a local place through the drop box. But they mailed me ordering me to pay for it. Needless to say I didn't pay it. Imagine if someone got you arrested for failure to do inventory on their part.
:P
Also makes me wonder about those people who check out a library book and don't return it for like 50 years. What kind of late fees would they be looking at
God spoke to me
I sort of thought they get rid of most debt based arrests.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I have to return some videotapes.
I bet it was "The BEST VHS in the WORLD!"
There's obviously more to this story. What are we missing?
Well, at least at my university library, Cost of replacement, or if you bring it back... $10.
Provided no law modifies that.
Arresting someone for theft under $10 ("Monster-In-Law" on DVD retails for about $5) seems to be a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars. A more efficient punishment would be to seize wages/tax refunds/etc. in the amount of the theft + some additional punitive amount.
How are we going to arrest people on frivolous charges when movies are streamed? I suppose we could make it a felony to fail to rewind a stream when you're done viewing it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Blockbuster ended late fees and just auto billed you the full cost.
Rewind.
Have gnu, will travel.
They had a choice to violate the law.
Well ... NSA did violate (and is still violating) the Constitution and no one punish them.
The cops have no discretion when a warrant is valid... particularly with a valid in-state warrant. When the warrant was issued, no one knew it would take 9 years for the woman to be tagged with it. Indeed, it would have been a greater waste of taxpayer resources to try to track her down over a $10 video and execute the warrant 9 years ago personally instead of by mail. Many petit larceny cases are treated like this.
There must be more to it. The owner must have held a grudge of some kind against this woman to have gone to the trouble. It says he sent "several certified letters" regarding the video. Just the cost of sending "several" certified letters alone would be more than the cost of the movie in 2005. Maybe back in the 80s, when commercial VHS tapes of movies cost $60+, it would have made a little more sense, but not in 2005. He had some personal reason to go after this woman.
Also, as someone else pointed out, the statute of limitations would apply here. South Carolina has one of the shortest statute of limitations I've ever seen. It's only 3 years for both written and oral contracts.
Better known as 318230.
I once had to pay $50 for two redbox DVDs which I did properly return. Apparently their machine didn't register it or got disconnected from the internet. They also said they audited the box and did not find the videos. However, their audit was incorrect, because I returned it. I don't do business with redbox anymore.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
More likely some porn the shop owner was dying to get back.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Obviously, some people do age faster than other!
27-9=18
Cost for a single VHS cassette: these days, about $5
Cost in man hours for the paperwork, arresting, jailing, court costs and so on... into the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.
Seriously, what petulant, power-lording fuckwit sought this action?
She took my car to get groceries one day and got a ticket in the parking lot, mistakenly thought it was dismissed, she moved and never received any summons or notices that her license was revoked, went to drive on a military base late at night 6 months later to visit a friend, they ran her license and charged her with like 4 crimes for trying to enter a military based with a suspended license (2003, they treated her like a terrorist, she spent all night locked up with the MP's), it went to court, no mercy, jail.
At some point the issue of what's reasonable has to kick in. If she lost a VHS tape 9 years ago, and the store went under since then, (1) there's no victim, and (2) the replacement cost for the videotape is probably only a few dollars (check on eBay).
While I broadly agree that reasonableness has to be taken into consideration, I don't think that it's fair to say that there's no victim here simply because the store went under. I'm pretty certain that the store owner (and his partners, if any) for one will disagree with you- he was angry enough to file a police report. Also, applying your logic, all murders are victimless crimes since their victims are dead, which statement I think many people will find hard to agree with.
Best to just leave a site/channel/whatnot if you think they suck I'd say. Minimizes all the personal drama one tends to feel.
Sounds like she rented from the Gord.
http://www.actsofgord.com/inde...
Can't Stand Ya!
What is the statute of limitations on something like that? I mean FFS some states only have 3 years on theft I see it's an old warrant, but it's still bs if you ask me. I mean what if she just lost it? Even if she told them it would not be hard to lie about.
Maybe to avoid a lawsuit by the private jail company for lost profits?
And just what a prosecutor be up against if the woman insists that she did in fact return the DVD? Imagine trying to claim that every worker in the store was always alert and on the ball and no transaction was ever neglected. imagine trying to find all the people who worked in the store, the managers, accountants etc. and the vast expense of a full trial. Imagine the law suit she just might have for the pain and suffering caused by the false accusation. Who can really say that some errant employee did not make off with the movie that she returned? They may have grabbed a tiger by the tail without a manual on how to let go.
See, chances are the charges about "stealing" the video will be dropped, because the Video Store company will probably not show up for a court date against her. But that didn't change that she had a bench warrant issued for her back when the store was still around.
What will happen is this: She will show up for the court date and the judge will dismiss the charges because of the age and that the video store is no longer around.
Had she bothered to take care of it back in the day, she would of gotten a fine and no jail time. But since she didn't, and they apparently don't have an age limit on those type of warrants, she got served the warrant when they found out she had one. And the warrants mean you get arrested and put in jail until you can go before a judge. So for her that was spending a night in jail for a video.
Be seeing you...
This is TMZ shit. This is not ... well, okay, it is what-is-still-called-slashdot shit. My bad. I forgot all the rotten piles of smelly shit slashdot calls news for nerds now.
obv you don't read TMZ, they do celebrity news etc. this isn't tmz. this is yahoo news.
Page is unreadable due to obstrusive ads, including sound ads. -1 would not click again.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Both news sources are similar in that they are best avoided.
Laws are on the books for when there is a trouble maker not to keep order
aside from blatant murder, larceny and shoving your peener in a squeely meat socket, the majority of the other crimes are just made up to pad pockets and keep those in power, in power.
She did everyone at that video store a favor.
That movie was horrible.
27-9=18 not 16
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Doesn't that hold here? Since it was a mindemeanor at worst (less than $100 value), this should be thrown out of court like a bad habit!
Yup... The blockbuster in Amarillo at the time insisted that I did not return the items. They were rude and tried to bill me full price for two DVDs. It was only when I insisted that they watch some security tapes from the night in question that clearly showed me returning the items did they stop harassing me. That was when Netflix was first starting in 1997..It was a no brainer to switch from Blockbuster to Netflix right then and there and I am still with Netflix... And people wonder why Blockbuster went out of business.... :-0
--
Time is on my side
Blockbuster ended late fees and just auto billed you the full cost.
And Blockbuster went bankrupt.
The corrupt ones look the other way for the highest bidder and their associates. If you think this is better ... wow, you are crazy.
I'm sure there must be others, but this is the first I have heard of anyone else being jailed for an overdue movie since I suffered the same in 1996. I had moved away to college the day after renting a movie, both myself and my roommate thought each other had returned the movie. It turns out that it had gotten mistakenly buried in the "big box of VHS movies" we all probably had at the time. About a year later, I was a passenger in someone else's car which got stranded in an ice storm. We were "rescued" by a sheriff who apparently thought he was saving the world by checking our IDs and criminal records (after being innocently stranded in an ice storm, I guess I already said that) and found that I was wanted for 5th degree theft for said overdue movie. I was then escorted to the local jail and spent the night. I have told this story at both my expense and to much laughter from the audience. It is indeed a joke!
There was nothing stopping the cops from saying "hey judge, you sure about this warrant for a 9 year old video? We'll try and get to it after we round up our rape, murder and robbery suspects."
Correct. You should try soylentnews.org for your news instead!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The police are not obligated to launch SWAT raids on people's homes simply because theres an arrest warrant for parole violation.
For one thing, the police aren't even involved, just the sheriff...
I'm not sure what hairs you're splitting, but I don't buy it. Any and all other issues aside, any government agent (1) issued a badge and (2) a gun who can (3) apprehend you and (4) put you in the back of their car - all fit in the same basic category. Don't call them police if you like, but it's mighty disingenuous to try to call someone else on it.
(Rabid apologists: Please note that I'm not calling for an end to law enforcement or lambasting them in any way. Misinterpretation of this post may be met with excoriation, or mocking silence.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
... And people wonder why Blockbuster went out of business.... :-0
Wow - you must watch a lot of movies!!!
Only big ligs use sigs.
... should be jailed too!
Video rentals pay a LOT more for their rental copies then retail price, that is why they are allowed to rent them out to begin with. They most certainly do NOT pay bargain bin prices for them, especially prices 9 years later.
Since you obviously don't have a clue on this subject, I will consider all your other statements and ideas as equally ill informed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Video stores bought special copies, back when rental was still big, these copies were available earlier then retail release of the same movie. And they did cost more.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Where is the sensationalism? The moral outcry? Just boring facts and sensibility.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
but shes lucky
I, too, was trying to tease out the tech angle of this story. But "news for nerds" covers a lot of nonsense, doesn't it? And what could be nerdier than VHS tape? There, I think I made it relevant.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
You could play Six Degrees of Nerdy Bacon. VHS goes in a VCR, and my VCR is hooked up to my computer, and computers are nerdy, so that gives VHS a nerdy score of... 3?
I've read a number of news articles where the process law was misused by collections agencies, basically turning criminal law into a tool for civil collections.
The collections agencies were misrepresenting having notified people who owed small-time debts and managing to get bench warrants issued for not showing up to civil court. So when these people have a minor law enforcement contact, the warrant shows up and off to jail they go.
Nope. But if blockbuster did it to them. it probably happened to many, many others whom in turn told their friends, and then they told others. I too was charged extra return days due to the way that blockbuster tallied the returns and how it was charged. I did not like Netflix since stuff kept on getting lost coming to me (at first, I hear that they fixed that), but now with redbox, I don't miss blockbuster at all either.
It's "9 years earlier". The hyphen comes into play when adjectivizing. (Such as the "27-year-old" bit seen later.)
That reminds me. I still need to return a book to the library. Better get on it within the next 9 years.
Why the fuck is your VCR hooked up to your computer?
Isn't this how they caught Al Capone?
Remember that, and don't go to police stations.
Actually, some research suggests that police utilize discretion unjustly. When there are too many laws to enforce every case, police must use (you guessed it) discretion in deciding which cases to pursue.
That could involve "just" discretion, i.e. ignoring minor infractions that don't impose harm to anyone else. It could also involve unjust discretion, such as ignoring infractions by people of your own race and throwing the book at people of other races.
See for example: http://scholarship.law.duke.ed...
Oh, and F*ck Beta. (Why, you ask? Because just a week or so after Dice publishes their mea culpa, we're slowing things way down and we won't push this out because it's not ready yet... the default dns record of slashdot.org redirects to beta. Also, Beta ate this comment the first time I tried posting it.)
I don't know how it works socially in prison when you talk about your jail time but it would be interesting to know whats going on when she talks about her reason... lol
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
Why not a loaf of bread? I thought that there legal principles - automatically aplicable anywhere civilized beyond Dicken's era - that kept that sort of barbarity from occurring.
And nothing for stealing millions in Wall Street. Welcome to America.
For pretty much the same reason I have a USB floppy drive. So I can move stuff from older media formats to newer media formats.
> jailed
> 27-year-old Kayla Finley rented Monster-in-Law
Oh come on, wasn't that self-punishment enough?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I hope the MPAA makes an example of her.
For arrest warrants and fugitive investigations for people whose underlying crimes that have a statute of limitations, the police should have to either drop the charges when the statute of limitations would have run out, some point before that date, start making continuous, real (not merely "pro-forma") efforts to find and arrest the person, or at a minimum go to court every few months explaining why they don't have enough information pursue the person.
In other words, if the police want you, they can't be allowed to just put your file into a computer and forget about it forever. At some point, they either have to keep spending some effort on your case or drop it.
For cases where the underlying crime has no statute of limitations, like murder, this would not apply.
In most U.S. states, theft of a DVD is going to be a misdemeanor and in some states its a fine-only offense if the value of the DVD is very low. The statutes of limitations for such crimes are typically 7 years or less, depending on the state. In some states they are 3 years or less.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
For one thing, the police aren't even involved, just the sheriff (an officer of the court).
In most places in the US a sheriff is a police officer with legal responsibility to a county. In a lot of places they are the principal police force.
She rented "Monster in Law".
In her defense, she must have had traumatic amnesia that erased any memory associated with the movie.
.. was that she rented "Beaches".
How is this not an-already-in production buddy-cop movie about the video return police?
Seriously I would almost switch places with this person just to get the chance to evade arrest when the arrest charge is failure to return a vhs tape to a closed business, 9 years after the fact.
...the movie was "Catch me if you can" (no, I didn't read the link- why should I?).
What else is there to say?
No comment necessary. Stupid is what stupid does. This is South Carolina. North Carolina is just the same, all you do is just change the name. In fact the whole South is like this. And not to put too fine a point on it, every point on earth south of the Mason Dixon latitude line is like this. (except Australia and New Zealand).
Don't move there. Don't take a job there. Unless you have the money to deal with stupid sh*t like this.
But you'll need a lot of money. Because there are a lot of just plain stupid people in the South.
This is almost as good as the NY cop who made a blind woman clean up dog poop with her bare hands after her seeing eye dog pooped in the curb, where he's supposed to. People in South Carolina are probably paying these police close to $100,000/year. I wonder if anyone considered giving the complainant $5 and firing an excess police officer to make up the difference?
deprived a poor innocent corporation of its rightful profits.
She should be arrested just for renting that movie!
(just kidding, I haven't seen it.. I do know it was generally panned though)
the "special" videotapes that come with their licensing to rent
In what country? The featured article is about an event that happened in the United States of America, where no special license under copyright is required to rent a copy of an audiovisual work. The only things for which a special license for "rental, lease, or lending" is required under 17 USC 109 are a phonorecord of a sound recording or a copy of a computer program other than one for a game console. You're confusing it with the "rental window" practice, where VHS tapes of motion pictures would cost $100 when they came out soon after the theatrical window and the price would fall to a "sell-through" $20 several months later. If you can provide U.S. statutory or case law citations to the contrary, I'd be glad to look at them.
What you are advocating is a return to Debtors' Prison. THAT is how things used to be done, AC. If the item is of such a low value that the prosecutor and police don't want to bother apprehending you, then that judge should not have issued the bench warrant at all. He should have told the property owner to do what businesses usually do- write it off on taxes as a loss and sell it to a debt collector. You really want Comcast or Verizon throwing you in jail for a charge you supposedly owe that usually always ends up being a "computer error"? NO! No you don't! And even if it was a valid debt, like that unreturned video, you have to realize that sometimes shit happens and life isn't fair. I do not want the police wasting time hunting someone down for keying your precious car when some unknown assailant has kidnapped and raped some teenager.
Most rental shops simply charged fees/the cost of the movie. They usually have credit card information on hand, so it shouldn't be that hard. (Most stores would rather charge triple the price and replace the stock. Rental agreements usually cover replacements/costs/losses.)
Maybe there's more to the story. Maybe she passed fraudulent credit card info, a bad check/deposit, or something else.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they are old movies, you're better off just downloading them. Even the poorest 700MB DVD rip will look better than those VHS tapes.
You know, I've looked and looked and looked, but I just can't find my grandmother's home movies on The Pirate Bay. You'd think she'd seed more.
The woman was jailed for ignoring a summons to appear in court. She was NOT jailed for not returning the movie. She has not been prosecuted (assuming that even happens) on the rental issue.
Here in NC we have similar video rental laws, and they are all abused by video store operators. As a law student I used to handle these criminal cases in mediation. If you lose a video tape or fail to return a 20 dollar video, you are on the hook for criminal prosecution. Most people don't want a misdemeanor on their record, so they are at the mercy of the vendor. I've seen store operators settle these cases for hundreds of dollars despite the fact that they replaced the video for 10 bucks shortly after it went missing.
Mediating a couple of those disputes would make any idealist feel dirty.
In 2005 she would have been a minor. How could there have ever been a "contract" with a minor? This is ludicrous!
In South Carolina you have 3 years to bring a civil action. So the owner still has the right to compensation for the video and related court and administrative costs. As for swearing out a warrant for theft, that is a very grey area. She did not steal the tape as they gave it to her at the store. If she stole it she would have been arrested at the time for shoplifting. I"m sure the statue of limitations for criminal actions has come and gone. Most statues of limitations on criminal actions such as this are only 7 year. If it took 9 years for the police to arrest her then the state failed her by not allowing her speedy justice by failing to arrest her in a timely fashion. If I were her lawyer I would take two approaches to have this thing thrown out. 1. I would say that she did not steal the tape as it was given to her and if she did not return it that was a contractual civil matter and the police overstepped their bounds by getting in the middle of a contract between the store and this woman. The police are not to be arbiters of civil contracts. 2. The statue of limitations is over on any if any criminal actions that might have ever happened. What gets me is this stuff is so plain to see that the police just live to put people in chains and make a bust. None of the police ever seem to have a mind of their own to think for themselves. The police in our country would have made good Nazi's. They take orders and do their jobs without question. I think I remember hearing the phrase over and over at the Nuremberg trial, "I was just following orders." Our country has taken up where the Nazi's have left off. We have made it illegal just to be alive it's time we decriminalize the act of being human and stop putting each other in jail over such nonsense. Jail should be reserved for bad people who are a danger to society.
Paul E. Bahre
I could be in some serious trouble. Eight years ago I borrowed 'The New Superman' from an independent video store. A few days later I frequented the store's premises to return the item but the store had closed business and was boarded up. There was no letter-box to post the item through and no way of leaving it anywhere else for retrieval. So two problems befell me that evening:
i) I was returning the item late, so the business could have been operating when I began incurring late fines.
ii) I ended up keeping the item as there was no way of returning it, so technically I may have stolen it during the businesses existence.
In my defence, I ended up gifting the DVD to a charity shop. But this could have inadvertently implicated them in the crime of handling stolen goods, and also the person who purchased it too.
The worst thing about this is that I don't even like Superman.
If we only would know that the story is true, we should expose the officers doing that
Chris
maybe I missed an important part, but why was this person "Looking for a reason" to lock up anyone? specifically this women.