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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
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.
From TFA "Finley was at the sheriff's office on another matter when the outstanding warrant was discovered" so looking for a reason to lock her up and found an open warrant.
I sort of thought they get rid of most debt based arrests.
In theory, the US abolished debtors' prisons in the early 1830s(details vary by state, as usual).
In in practice, well, you can always spin a new set of legalisms to achieve the same effect, can you not?
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?...
Except you already agreed to a plan that legally spells out what happens when you fail to return it, charges and fines.
Assuming that this is not the only rental story in the history of rental stores that does not have overdue-charges, she did not legally steal the movie, she just owed them thousands of dollars in late fees and interest.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
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.
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
(1)Depends on how much revenue they lost due to that tape being tied up. The victims are the shareholders --- probably they can still be repaid. They need to be repaid in 2005 dollars adjusted for inflation, however; a ~20% increase on top reparations for what the value was in 2005... $100 worth of property and revenue loss in 2005 dollars, is a loss of $120.70 in 2014.
(2) Back in 2005, the replacement cost would have been much higher; the "special" videotapes that come with their licensing to rent, cost a pretty penny compared to the normal consumer VHS tapes....
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.
Sure, if you go to court and get the debt discharged. If you just don't bother returning borrowed property it is just theft.
Actually, if you don't return borrowed, rented, or leased property, it is called conversion, not theft. The difference is that in the first case, you initially had the property legally in your possession, while in the case of theft, there is never legal possession. Conversion can occur without criminal intent as in, "I didn't return the library book, because I lost it." As with most things, laws vary widely by state. Since this is South Carolina, the woman will probably do hard time especially if she is poor and/or black.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
1) The victim is whoever absorbed the assets of the company at its closing. They've lost the value of the tape.
2) Being a licensed rental copy, the replacement cost is in the range of a hundred dollars or more.
The basic issue is that the law doesn't get to be ignored just because the media can spin the story to sound trivial. If someone robbed a store of $100 worth of merchandise, had an arrest warrant issued at the time, then spent nine years on the run, would it still be unreasonable for them to be arrested today? At the most basic level, the purpose of law is to provide a consistent accounting of what behavior society does or does not approve of. If a magistrate chose to neglect an old outstanding arrest warrant, then there'd be something very wrong.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If she lost a VHS tape 9 years ago, and the store went under since then, (1) there's no victim
Are you seriously not seeing the cause-effect relationship here?
As long as the debt is actually correct, then throwing a dead beat dad in jail is fine with me. It's when you go to court to fix their $7500.00 mistake only to find out two months later they screwed up and set it to $75,000.00 instead of zero! So please don't assume that a person is a dead beat dad because one of the most inept and incompetent agencies in the government says so.
Shh, don't say that here. AK Marc believes that the value of money increases with inflation, because magic.
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...
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?
If you knew anything about how law worked, she was jailed because a bench warrant was issued due to her lack of response on returning the video. The Judges give the warrants and the police carry them out. So, they have no choice but to arrest her because of the warrant, even if the charges seem lacking. She could of avoided all of this back when and choose not to. Now the video rental cost her a night in jail.
Be seeing you...
Yeah, in my state, they really screwed things up. A friend of mine got divorced about 10 years ago and his judgment from the judge says he is to pay X amount per month to his ex-wife for child support. So he does, every month. Then about 2 years ago, the state decides that all child support has to be funneled through a state agency. So, then he starts getting garnishments at work, payable to the state agency. Of course, since they are taking the money out of his paycheck, he can no longer afford to pay his ex-wife directly, which puts him in violation of the child custody agreement. But so far nobody is crying about that. His ex-wife is crying however, because she is used to getting paid by my friend on the first of the month. The amount is getting withdrawn from my friends check on the first, but doesn't get paid to his ex-wife until about 3 weeks later. So, in the mean time, he is spotting her money that he doesn't have to pay her.
Then, to make matters worse, the state decided that he owed about $15,000 in back child support, even though he has paid it every month faithfully. He is able to come up with cancelled checks for all but about 18 months. So they are forced to back down on the $15,000, but they insist that he pays the amount of those 18 months, even though he already has. Even his ex-wife says that he paid it, but the state doesn't believe them and insists that he pay them the 18 months.
So now, he has finally finished paying off the 18 months that he already paid, and one of his children is over 18 and no longer living with the ex-wife and no longer eligible for child support. The state agency does not allow you to pre-emptively file to get wage garnishments removed. You cannot do so until the day that the garnishment is no longer valid. However, once you file, there is a backlog (3 months and counting so far) before they process the removal of the garnishment. They continue to take money out of my friends check. They have, however, stopped making payments to his ex-wife since the child is no longer a minor and no longer in the household. They stopped that the day she turned 18 without anyone needing to file any paperwork.
Even crazier, the company we work for recently changed the company that does the payroll, so the state had to renew the now invalid garnishment with the new company in order to keep collecting the money that they are not entitled to and are not giving to the ex-wife.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Both news sources are similar in that they are best avoided.
That is not surprising. It's not like they couldn't have come up with $450 to pay their fines. They didn't want to pay it and gambled that they wouldn't get busted. And they did. At that time, they had to come up with twice what they would have had to pay for the fine. They gambled and lost.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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
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Time is on my side
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!
... And people wonder why Blockbuster went out of business.... :-0
Wow - you must watch a lot of movies!!!
Only big ligs use sigs.
Pickens County deputy Hashe claims that Finley was at the sheriff's office on another matter when the outstanding warrant was discovered.
So neither guns nor cars where involved here, she was already at the sheriff's office for a different, unrelated matter. Btw, that's probably why it took so long to execute that warrant (which actually was issued the same year that she failed to return the movie): the matter was too trivial to send a squad car with armed officers to her home, and police basically ignored it.
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.
That reminds me. I still need to return a book to the library. Better get on it within the next 9 years.
It is pretty routine to ignore these types of warrants until they land in your face.
When they first received the warrant they may have rolled by her home, and if she was not there, put it in a pile of unlocated warrant suspects and log it in the computer. Now the next time she had an interaction with law enforcement, say a speeding ticket or a proof of insurance checkpoint, the warrant would pop up and she would be arrested and taken to court to clear the warrant.
If the issue was too trivial to pursue then it shouldn't have been warranted in the first place. America is too heavy handed with "justice" these days and it can be boiled down to the zero-tolerance (zero-thinking) bullshit. The judge should have told him to do the same thing businesses usually do- write it off on taxes as a loss and sell it to a credit collection agency.
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.
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.