Criminal Call Craziness

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Mobile phones outnumber animals in many parts of the country, and they’re better looked after to boot. They’ve leaked into every part of life, including some completely crazy criminal cases - crazy here because the “culprits” were either innocent, already guilty, or actually part of the process meant to tell one from the other.

1.“Theft By Finding”

A Liverpool teenager out for his 18th birthday found a phone, dropped into his local police station to hand it over, and was arrested. If you spotted where that sentence went crazy, well done on being smarter than the officers at the time. It wasn’t even a simple time-saving measure against a Liverpool lad celebrating legal drinking age - he was charged with “theft by finding”, which the legal experts among you might realise isn’t actually a criminal charge. You might also be able to deduce that if you speak English.

Skills apparently beyond those who arrested Paul Leicester, held him for four hours, and took a DNA sample. If he’s held for four hours for finding a phone, we don’t know how long they should get for taking his entire genetic code, but suspect you’ll have to build the cell out of something that’ll survive the universe collapsing. He was eventually released and wisely decided not to press a complaint; if that’s what returning lost property gets him, actually complaining would probably trigger a SWAT team with rocket launchers.

2. Convicts’ Carrier Pigeon Phone Parts

In the most brilliantly insane combination of communication methods since Captain Cyber-Navajo set fire to the internet to send smoke signals, Colombian prisons are battling carrier pigeons smuggling cellphone parts. Smuggling them in tiny suitcases, in fact, a detail we put in a separate sentence to prevent your mind from exploding.

Colombian convicts are training birds to smuggle high-tech gadgets and equipping them with human equipment to do so. The prison warders confess confusion as to how to deal with this, which is odd, because we know for a fact Colombia has flamethrowers. That might sound like overkill but listen: pigeons cause enough trouble armed only with their own asses. If we let them receive tool training from convicted murderers, it’ll make Alfred Hitchcock look like he was telling a children’s story about funny feathered friends.

3. Funnest Lawyer Ever

US Lawyer Jason Keller was prosecuted for smuggling cell phones, chargers, and heroin into prison. We’re not experts on an economy where handjobs have an exchange rate, but the job requirements for prison drug-mule are “Being smaller than Bubba and not wanting to be shanked.” “Seven years of law school” is significant overqualification, but from the sounds of it he spent most of that time in the canteen huffing paint thinner.

A law degree to peddle powder in prison - we’re assuming this is some kind of ultrajail where the average convict lectures Lex Luthor and the guards are all cloned hybrids of Einstein and Schwarzenegger. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve suddenly got a film script to write.

Via Dialaphone