The phrase "victimless crime" is used to describe something that is technically against the law, but ultimately harms nobody. Here we have a case where the only victim of a crime ended up being the guy who committed it in the first place. Last week we reported on a man who was arrested for having a VHS tape that was 14 years overdue. Luckily, the man now has the star of that movie backing him up.
James Myers was pulled over last Tuesday for a broken taillight and ended up being arrested on a misdemeanor warrant for failure to return rental property. The property in question was a VHS tape of the Tom Green film, Freddy Got Fingered which Myers had rented from a video store in 2002. Readers under the age of 25 may need to google the phrase "video store" in order to follow the rest of this. Writer, and star Tom Green got wind of the arrest and feels he has an obligation to help out his fan, as long as doing so isn’t too expensive to do so. According to the New York Daily News, Green said:
If it’s 200 bucks, of course I’ll pay it for him, just for the principle of the thing.
The more we hear about the story, the stranger it all gets. James Myers says that this wasn’t the first time that he was pulled over since 2002, so why the warrant was only served now is a mystery. Did the other officers who pulled him over decide that the entire thing was so ridiculous that they didn’t even bring it up, or had the warrant been lost in the system for some reason until now? Myers, for his part, doesn’t appear to have lost his sense of humor over being handcuffed for failure to return a VHS copy of Freddy Got Fingered, but does feel that the efforts of his local police department could be best served elsewhere. He said:
You got the ISIS stuff going on, and here I am losing half my day over a VHS tape.
We’re not quite sure how involved the Concord, North Carolina police department gets dealing with ISIS. We assume the local district attorney will allow this crime to plead down to a citation for willfully viewing shitty movies. James Myers apparently rewatched the movie last week. No word on whether he viewed it on his ill-gotten VHS tape, and he thinks the movie is "hilarious."
Nevermind, we take it back. Arrest this guy. The nation’s cinemas need to be protected from his taste.
We’re looking forward to seeing how this will get resolved. The $200 fine likely won’t cover the expense of booking the man for the offense, which makes the entire thing even more ridiculous.
