Oklahoma woman charged with felony for not returning VHS tape 21 years ago
okcfox.com
okcfox.com
I feel like she's owed damages, not just dismissal.
What motivates a DA to charge someone with a felony over a VHS tape?
A similar situation is when DAs stack on extra charges for a crime. The addon charges almost never make sense to the actual crime too, it always reads more like a gotcha. It turns what should be a Class C misdemeanor into a Class A, extraordinary fines, and jail time.
The lack of accountability of public offices towards citizens is problematic. I think is a general apathy in government jobs. It doesn’t matter how incompetent you are, and how many people you hurt - you’ll never go “out of business,” tax payers will pay for your mistakes, and you won’t be held responsible for the impact of your actions. So why even try?
There ought to be some feedback loop that forces the public sector to improve itself.
There is. We live in a democracy. Work to elect better and more accountable officials. If none exist, consider running yourself.
Setting expectations of "don't like it? Well quit your job, give up 12 mo of your life to campaign and fix it yourself!" is not healthy for our society.
I have tried in the past as well. Political apathy is a very real, very dangerous vulnerability in our system of government, and is being exploited all the time.
The word "we" is pulling a lot of weight in that statement. All politics suffers a free rider problem. We'll fix it if we fix it, sure, but I don't have to be part of that.
But this is by design since policy affects all.
Direct action matters, and to dismiss it as "not my responsibility" is shirking the entire point of democracy.
Government was created by man. It's a good idea that where we can improve them mechanically, we should strive to do so. Same as is done for everything else created by man.
Imagine if kids in later life had to live with the a sense of guilt knowing that their parent could be in jail because the forgot to return a video tape they wanted to watch. Would make a now adult turn a whole childhood into latent anxiety worries and were does it end.
Not everyone is being slapped with the same charges.
We also have a special class of speeding ticket for a dumb “parkway” freeway that rich white people lobbied for and received a 45 mph speed limit by state constitutional amendment. Any ticket in this zone for speeding between 45-55 mph is a simple $100 fine that is not even recorded or reported to insurance. This means the speed limit is effectively 55 mph, and an easy way around the constitutional amendment.
This freeway is I35E between downtown St Paul, MN and Mendota Heights, MN.
"Tough on crime" sadly has a long and sordid history of similar convictions.
A VHS tape could quite well be a lot more expensive than you would expect. If the studio expected that a tape would be mostly rented by consumers rather than bought by consumers they would often price it very high.
> can
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/923844907/when-shoplifting-is...
Someone shared with me how they deal with this in Australia, and I wish they did that here in the US. Employers can't just run background checks and interpret the data any way they want.
You send the job description to the police, and they run the background check and just return the employer a "yes/no" as to whether the person is okay for the job description, based on the specifics of the job and the background.
Edit: Yes, there are concerns about doing this in the US. I thought it was worth sharing anyway, as there are probably changes you could make to get the "good" part of this working here.
The general concept is interesting, though.
It’s based on what job you’re going to perform, so people that have money laundering convictions probably are still allowed to volunteer for the local Boy Scouts.
There are several levels and categories and it’s usually returned within a few days.
Presumably the police would have also considered an open warranty for felony embezzlement to be a "do not hire" situation.
We can't even get police to stop murdering BBIPOC, why on earth would we want to give them the ability to say yes/no to anyone getting a job?
But, yes, there would be some big hurdles to this in the US.
In the came of victimless crimes, well, just get rid of it! In the case of minor crimes, reparation should be a priority, instead of punishing the actors. It's even better not to persecute than waste a lot of resources in a case (what would be completely inadmissible if we were talking about private justice).
The worst that will happen in this case is the lawyers coming to an agreement that the suspect will pay the late fee and the case be dropped as the defence can surely convince the prosecution that wasting money of this is in no one's interest.
As for victim-less crimes, they exist because despite most people chanting that they do not want them, they in fact do want them, but simply are convinced there is an actual victim in the cases where they want them.
One example, a childhood friend of mine got a $75 parking ticket that he was not aware of, by the time he found out it was now $250 due to late fees and the state revoked his car registration. Unknown to him, he’s pulled over on the way to work and now gets slapped with another $200 for driving an unregistered vehicle. It was the end of the month, he didn’t have $500 to pay the fines and had to drive to work or lose his job. Pulled over again, this time license revoked and the fees are over $1000 and growing every month he could not pay. A warrant was eventually issued for his arrest, resulting in more fees accrued for the arrest and the interest of his unpaid fees while he was in jail.
Ask any poor person and they can tell you this exact same story - it’s not uncommon at all and in my opinion an evil practice intended to exploit the poor because they can’t resist it.
>lawyers coming to an agreement
Ha ha, I’m sure the person struggling to stay afloat can afford a lawyer.
So all these things happened and it was all during this unknown to him that it happened?
How does one have one's driver's licence revoked without being informed thereof?
This more so reads as though he did not properly read the notices he received from the government.
> Ha ha, I’m sure the person struggling to stay afloat can afford a lawyer.
That is why lawyers are appointed to the indigent in criminal cases.
> That is why lawyers are appointed to the indigent in criminal cases.
Are you speaking from direct experience with any of this? If not, please stop repeating plesant fictions of how the system claims to operate.
I have a friend whose license got suspended with no notice, until they were pulled over and their car was towed. The state insists that having sent "notice" by first class mail (with no guarantee of delivery) is good enough, even though certified mail is the minimum for legal process.
I also have another friend that had only a few hundred dollars to their name, was arrested and charged with a felony, and was laughed at when asking to continue with the public defender after the arraignment. The system will readily give you representation so you can be formally charged, after that you're on your own. They had to end up borrowing cash for bail and ongoing representation.
That doesn't even touch upon the injustice of being wrongfully arrested, acquitted, but still having to pay for the legal circus and missed work. Actual reality is much different than the narratives held by people that haven't ever had to suffer the system.
Maybe the department that issues tickets in your town doesn't have modern internet connected systems, so they only send notices by mail. If they have the wrong address in their systems for whatever reason (multiple legacy computer systems that don't talk to each other, happens all the time), you won't get the notice but you'll still be held responsible.
It's entirely plausible in cases like these that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing - the ticket is generated, various due dates are set and the paper notices are dispatched, but there's no system to verify if the notices are delivered. Instead, the due dates pass without response and the system generates more fees, more notices, more due dates, until the above scenario reaches its conclusion where a warrant for arrest is issued and makes its way into the police computer systems. In many places in the USA, there's no built-in feedback for the ticket-issuing authorities to ensure that notices were actually received until the police get involved with a warrant. The notices are just fired off, the government says it's the citizen's responsibility no matter what, and they wash their hands of the consequences.
Additionally, in some places traffic tickets in particular have their own separate mini-justice system called "traffic court" or similar, and different rules apply - like no court-appointed lawyers because it's not technically a crime, no juries or even a "real" judge (just a magistrate or administrator), and so on.
It also varies wildly by state and town. It's hard to talk about governance in the USA in general terms because it is so highly federated. For all the power and visibility of the federal government, state and local authorities wield enormous influence over the lives of their citizens. In some ways, the USA is closer in structure to the EU than a single unified country.
In many ways, interacting with government and the justice system in the USA is incredibly byzantine, verging on kafka-esque. If you search around, you will find an endless series of stories of people who commit some minor infraction and are subsequently lost in the labyrinth of government, sometimes even destroying their lives and livelihoods in the process.
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Lawyers and being appointed don’t work that way. Why would you be appointed a lawyer for non criminal activities?
She doesn't have to be prosecuted to be persecuted.
Edit: the "joke" is the number of people (notoriously) held in Rikers island for ridiculous "crimes".
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
This does make me wonder how many other similar cases are floating around.
though, it could also be the case that prosecutors need an excuse to drop cases like this, and negative coverage in the media is a good one.
I don’t see why they would need an excuse. They have wide latitude on prosecutorial discretion:
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/prosecutorial-discre...
> Blau told FOX 25 Thursday that McBride will need to get her case expunged in order to clear her record moving forward.
Why would her record even need clearing if she was not convicted of anything.
Charges and arrests are recorded even without convictions, and are public records. They aren’t legally punishments (though people may make adverse decisions based on them) so they neither require conviction nor automatically disappear without one.
This whole story needs some gravity, and more than what the local news station is giving it.
If a mechanical process were to, say, photograph you at a red light camera, ticket you, and perhaps automatically take the funds from your account you might have no recourse. And once we have such a can imagine worse with opaque ML models and few to no humans in the loop.
Of course the system we have is also ripe for abuse, and can be unthinkingly rigid as well (think of “Brazil”). But better than full automation.
I wrote “basically” because large companies that are deeply integrated into public life (nationally or locally — consider free speech requirements in shopping malls) reasonably deserve extra scrutiny at the very least. You don’t, in theory, pay taxes to your local electricity utility yet hey are far more controlled by public policy than, say, your local fruit stand.
Unfortunately most discussions in government about FB or Google can most charitably be described as incoherent.
Imagine, if instead of a prosecutor adding this to a record, a computer did it and the prosecutor's office could spend time reviewing outstanding non violent charges.
I was highlighting he drive to fully automated systems, as is increasingly the case in the private sector (due to sheer volume if nothing else).
But this is a case where humans _were_ in the loop yet acted like automatons themselves. They failed to apply the baseline level of judgment that would have stopped them filing felony charges for "embezzlement" of a VHS tape featuring a talking cat.
McBride said over the last 20 years, she's been let go from several jobs without being given a reason why. She told FOX 25, now, it all makes sense.
"This is why... because when they ran my criminal background check, all they're seeing is those two words: felony embezzlement," McBride said.
"...if the employer thinks it might not hire or retain you because of something in the report, it must give you a copy of the report and a 'notice of rights' that tells you how to contact the company that made the report." -- https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/background-checks-what-jo...
Now, is it a just charge? Almost certainly not. But that's a question that courts have to answer, it's what they're for.
She could possibly go after the person she was dating and, if she had evidence he did it without her knowing, she could maybe sue him for lost wages.
Felony embezzlement sounds excessive for a movie rental.
That's not the burden, last I checked.
> The EEOC enforces Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Having a criminal record is not listed as a protected basis in Title VII. Therefore, whether a covered employer's reliance on a criminal record to deny employment violates Title VII depends on whether it is part of a claim of employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-consi...
Wouldn’t a modern democracy, as we hold ourselves up to be, disallow the unfettered snooping into of ones past for most employment, housing, etc?
Dispatchers and police don't have full access to the details of the warrant either. They see "felony" and immediately change the interaction protocol, as we have seen too often the past few years.
Ms. McBride will probably spend another ten years doing the "expunge" dance as well.
Lazy, unaccountable, and inexcusable.
These criminal background checks are out of control. There has to be a smarter way of doing things.
It's quite obviously delaying as a dark pattern to make you give up and allow everything, but I wonder how legal that is?
Update: I left it running to see what would happen. Once the artificial delay completes, you're presented with an ominous warning:
"This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete. To complete the opt-out process, please click here to resubmit your preferences."
Clicking on that link brings you to another page on their site that basically does the same thing, except with the following warning:
"Some opt-outs may fail due to your browsers cookies settings. If you would like to set opt-out preferences using this tool you must allow third party cookies in your browser settings.""
All preferences are of course set to "Yes". Changing them to "no" and submitting again does the same artificial delay with percentage that slows down the closer it gets to 100% (and then sticks at 100% for good measure).
After this 5 minute process, it finally says my preferences have been saved, but with all these caveats, I wouldn't be surprised if it's tracking me anyway, using those warnings about browser settings as a fig leaf to hide behind.
> On Wednesday, the DA's office said after reviewing McBride's case, they've decided to dismiss it.
I’m surprises the DA doesn’t regularly review these cases. The shop closed in 2008. Even if they wanted to pursue it, wouldn’t it be beyond the statute of limitations? Yet it haunted her for decades. What a sham.
Probably not, because the charges were filed timely in March of 2000 and an arrest warrant issued. She may have legally been a fugitive from justice until the DA dismissed the charges, which would toll the statute of limitations.