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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.
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.
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...
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?
So you take something. The owner asks for it back. You refuse. You stole it.
The owner goes to a court to sue you to get it back, because the value is too low for a state prosecutor to care. You ignore the suit. The judge issues an arrest warrant at the request of the owner. The owner then politely sends you several certified letters impressing upon you your duty to resolve the issue. You ignore those letters, and in particular ignore an order of the court.
Later, you're arrested and forced to appear in court.
How is that thuggery? For one thing, the police aren't even involved, just the sheriff (an officer of the court). This is old school justice, where the person wronged has to do all the leg work in court to vidicate his rights. This is how things were done long before jack-booted police even existed.
... 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.
This is bull. What's missing here is all sense of proportion. I'd love to have my former employers who owe me thousands of dollars in back pay thrown in jail. But it will never happen. Can bring a suit, and win it, but it doesn't matter, their companies are broke. Can't do anything more, like have a warrant issued. And there's this minor matter of the statue of limitations. Why wasn't this warrant voided after some appropriate time, like 7 years? Those former employers get off after only 4 years.
It cost us, the taxpayers, far more money than that video tape was worth to process this warrant. Justice is not served when actions taken in the name of justice cause far more damage and expense than they save and deter. Zero tolerance has its place, and this isn't it. That video rental company should never have had the power to sic the police on anyone, not for that. That they could have such power is all the more reason to pirate. And the police need to be reminded who their real bosses are: the public.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"