Stupidest Criminal...

[matt81]

Nothing is funnier than a stupid criminal, right?

There was a case where a burglar fell asleep on the bed, in the house,
with the couple whose house he was robbing. It sounds crazy, but it's a
true story. The folks at The Smoking Gun are having a funny award for
this year's "Stupidest Criminal", so I thought to start a thread here
to see if there were any good stories out there that we can submit to
their editors (long-shot but hey, you never know!!) In case you want to
check it out the show (it's called The Smoking Gun Year End Special),
it's going to air next Thursday night, I believe at 10pm. These guys
can be pretty hilarious so it's worth taping in case you aren't going
to be home.

Matt

[koto_ryu]

Nothing is funnier than a stupid criminal, right?

There was a case where a burglar fell asleep on the bed, in the house,
with the couple whose house he was robbing. It sounds crazy, but it's a
true story. The folks at The Smoking Gun are having a funny award for
this year's "Stupidest Criminal", so I thought to start a thread here
to see if there were any good stories out there that we can submit to
their editors (long-shot but hey, you never know!!) In case you want to
check it out the show (it's called The Smoking Gun Year End Special),
it's going to air next Thursday night, I believe at 10pm. These guys
can be pretty hilarious so it's worth taping in case you aren't going
to be home.

Matt

Well, he was definitely no ninja

[HtTKar]

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/121104_local_videogame.html

This is a pretty stupid group of criminals. possible candidate for the Darwin awards.

[Kimpatsu]

A Scottish drug addict ripped a CCT camera from the wall of a hospital, mistakenly thinkign that it was the same as a camcorder, which he could then sell for the nash needed for a quick fix. Of course, the video is actually recorded remotely, and the police had the video of him, looking full-on into the camera as he pulled it from its mounting. It only took them 15 minutes to arrest him, and he was reportedly "amazed at the sherriff's powers of detection".

[Kimpatsu]

[url]This is a pretty stupid group of criminals. possible candidate for the Darwin awards.

Don't you actually have to remove yourself from the gene pool (i.e., die) to qualify as a Darwin Awards candidate?

[HtTKar]

No...they just have to be stupid.
here's examples

Picture Perfect Cop
2003 Honorable Mention
Confirmed True by Darwin
(7 August 2003, Hartville, Wyoming) Like a true country child, Jim Pond was born to be wild… even though he had grown into the 47-year-old sheriff of Albany County. Watch him riding to the motorcycle rally in South Dakota, in the company of another cop and a friend. See the wild one riding without a helmet—after all, an experienced Harley rider can control his bike.
Who needs a helmet? But Jim did need something else—a photograph, a pictorial commemoration of the road trip to Sturgis, South Dakota. With the wind streaming through the riders’ hair at 65 mph, the conditions seemed right. Jim took his camera and turned around to snap a shot of the rider behind him.

As state trooper David Cunningham later described it, the motorcycle drifted to the right and headed for a telephone pole. Jim lost control trying to wrestle the bike back on the highway, and went sailing through the air, probably wishing for his helmet. When he landed, he broke his skull, four ribs, and a shoulder bone, and also suffered other head injuries and road rash, but managed, through incredible luck, to survive.

His camera was not so lucky. There is no report that the photograph survived.


###################################################

(27 March 27 1981) Late one March evening, Bruce Thompson woke up at the foot of a utility pole in the woods, his dog asleep by his side, and a crispy, dead raccoon nearby. Thompson realized he had suffered severe burns on his forearms, hands and genitals, which were eventually amputated.
The details came out in court, when Bruce sued the utility company for removing him from the gene pool.

He had been out ’coon hunting when his dog “caught the scent” and eagerly chased a raccoon up a power pole. The raccoon perched on a glass insulator. Bruce was prepared for just such an event, and brought out his trusty steel pole climbers. He strapped them to his boots, and made his way a dozen feet up the pole.

He began “squalling at the raccoon and slapping the pole,” causing the startled raccoon to run back and forth on the cross arm, and hit an un-insulated copper wire. That was the last thing Bruce remembered before he woke up at the bottom of the pole.

The court found Bruce contributory negligent, stating succinctly, “It [is] clear that, in climbing the utility pole, slapping and squalling at the raccoon, thereby agitating it when it was perilously close to charged wires, Thompson should have appreciated the hazard that ultimately befell him.”

[Kimpatsu]

A convicted felon in Britain who is nearing eligibility for parole is often sent to a minimum-security "open prison" for a few months to help him acclimatise to the outside world. One such prisoner absconded and, fearing pursuit, decided to change his appearance. He did this by discarding his most striking feature: his large, Kim Jong-Il-style glasses. Without them, however, he was blind as a bad, and so staggered up to the road and flagged down the first vehicle he could see coming... A police car whose occupants, recognising his chambray work shirt and denim pants to be the standard-issue uniform of prisoners at the local prison, promptly returned him. His spell of liberty lasted approximately 40 minutes.