Teenager Goes to Jail for Overdue DVD

How the hell is a DVD you can pick up for $1 on ebay/etc valued at $31.45?

WTF, seriously???

My mate had his lap top stolen after a bunch of chavs attacked him forcing him to drop his bags, and it took us 5 hours to be seen by the poilice.

but they have time to arrest some kid over an over due DVD, which could have been easily sorted by the library its self.

Stupid world

Yay! Debtors prison returns... for overdue DVDs!

Go oppressors!

Well, I do suppose that after multiple phone calls, summons, and skipping court, you do sort of ask for whatever you get. Poor kid probably didn't even know what they were.

This right here is a perfect example of how the legal system is so messed up.

I do not want to offend anyone here, so I will say it this way. Do you remember the word they described Chris's girlfriend on the episode about the daughter of the Alaskan governor on Family Guy? Retar***... That's what the prosecutors were, thanks for wasting our tax money on a $31 DVD... They should have used the cost of prosecuting this person for education in that city.

How come there is no way to waive impound fee? I went to "court" to fight the ticket and won but the fee cannot be waived. Is the lot run by private industry?

$460 & he still didn't even get to keep the DVD, what a sensible world we live in!!!!

At least next time I need to call the police and they tell me they have no officers available I will know they are doing something really worth while, and to think people are paying taxes to keep these idiots in a job

Wow, what a country

Lesson learned (I hope). Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.

I suppose the question is whether or not you believe his somewhat unbelievable story or, if like me, you think the kid simply stole the DVD and had no intention of returning it. If my suspicion is correct then yeah, throw the book at him.

"The city attorney told me, they weren’t concerned about due process. What they were concerned about was their DVD."

This does not surprise me. In Florida if your license gets suspended for any reason, the state is not required to tell you. So if you get pulled over you go to jail for driving on a suspended you may not even know about. Cases in point:

http://www.wftv.com/news/15689547/detail.html

http://www.wftv.com/news/15971739/detail.html

Don't they have real criminals to arrest?

You know it makes sense. That is one really good movie. I wouldn't want a riot happening at the Library from people wanting to check it out and the DVD not being there.

The DVD is so expensive for the library because it's a "special" copy that's authorized to be rented/borrowed out, just like the ones at video rental stores. There's nothing *really* different about it, but libraries and video stores that go about these things legally pay more for copies that they're licensed to rent/lend out.

As for this problem getting to the point it did, it's entirely the kid's fault. He borrowed the movie and never took it back. He moved without filing a change of address. He ignored or deleted the messages he did eventually get. So he payed a big fine, boo hoo; I'll be sure to play him a sad song on the world's tiniest violin. Maybe this will teach him a lesson about returning things that don't belong to him and keeping his contact information up to date.

Don't people have insurance for this kind of stuff? Seriously, cut your losses and move on!

While it's insane that this should ever have gone to even a court summons, I don't think he was arrested and jailed for having an overdue DVD but rather for contempt of court. A similar thing happened to a guy I know - he didn't pay his tax bill, moved, didn't set up a forwarding address and ended up missing a court date he didn't know about. He's now serving 2 years in prison after being arrested and prosecuted for contempt of court. The tax bill's still outstanding.

Tax payer dollars at work... prosecuting people over due library books is so much better then health care.

--to most of the people who posted, your morons. This guy left town. The library made calls and sent notices, and what was he doing during that entire time?? He certainly had ample time to return it.
--It shows that many people here have never seen what is a court summons: its an order to appear at court, and at the bottom is a special paragraph saying if you fail to show up on your date there will be consequences.
--The fact of the item being a dvd is meaningless because it could have been a book or whatever. The set value of $30 is what was the grounds to proceed by the library.
--In the end it was personal responsibility that he failed at.
--If you bought that margaritaville machine on a payment system, and you stopped to make anymore payments/skipped town. What do you think would happen? The creditor only has your last address and that is where the "system" falls into place.

The folks here posting and are all up in arms about this really don't understand the legal process. The kid wasn't arrested for not returning a DVD, the kid was arrested for skipping court. It's standard procedure. Skip court, get arrested. It'd happen to you if you were pulled over, didn't have proof of insurance and then didn't appear at your hearing to show a judge that you did have insurance, and in that case, you'd be arrested for litterally doing nothing wrong.

this is so far, the "WTF" of the year

good I do believe that ppl need to know that the library is something we all use. If you don't return it then the next person don't get a chance to use that "FREE" resource. maybe some of you should get up from that monitor and go see what the world really have to offer. Spent my whole childhood at a library reading. Becasue the F**** in this world didn't like geeks and nerds in the 80s???, and you seen to still don't. Yea I am antisocial, but now by choice. -->Leafman420

This is why more and more libraries now are turning to collection agencies. Some cities have millions of dollars of late fines or un-returned items on their books. The way a lot of public libraries are funded, that could be up to 10% of their yearly budget.

Oh and them tax payers dollars go to to companys' as of late to bail there sad butts out of trouble.