This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: The Plan
As I traveled around British Columbia this summer, I witnessed a lot of bad driving. There were a number of crashes, and in most cases those crashes were the result of people making really poor decisions. It dawned on me that my weekly column here is very often about people making really bad decisions. Most people who turn up in this column got caught doing something stupid with very little forethought.
This week I was considering the degree of forethought people put into their poor decisions. Our subjects looked at the problem, arrived at a solution, and committed to it. In each case the solution was considerably worse than the problem. All are recent cases. For some it was a summer of bad decisions.
The blind driver
There is braille on the buttons in the elevator. There is braille indicators on the buttons to activate traffic lights for the purpose of crossing the street. You will not find braille on the controls of your car for obvious reasons.
In the early morning hours of June 29, police on the M6 near Carlisle spotted a Vauxhall car weaving between lanes and onto the hard shoulder. Behind the wheel was Anthony Hall, 50, of Huddersfield, about 150 miles from where he had started.
Hall is registered blind. He has never held a driving licence. The car belonged to his partner, with whom he had shared four bottles of wine before setting off.
When stopped he explained his navigation method, and the whole thing goes from bad to magnificent. He told the officer he had gone blind about two years earlier but could still make out lights, so once he reached the motorway he had simply followed the tail lights of a lorry. He did so for 150 miles.
He provided breath samples over the legal limit. He pleaded guilty to dangerous driving, drink driving, driving with no licence and no insurance, and taking a vehicle without consent, and on Tuesday this week a British court gave him 36 weeks in prison suspended for 18 months, 10 rehabilitation activity days, a 90 day alcohol monitoring tag and £272 in costs. He arrived at court wearing dark glasses and carrying a white stick.
He was also disqualified from driving for 12 months. The court removed a licence he has never held, from a man who cannot see, who had just spent an entire night proving that neither of those things was ever the obstacle.
Easy fishing
On August 13, Arizona DPS troopers pulled a car over in Phoenix for what they politely call multiple civil traffic violations. As the trooper walked up, the driver and the passenger swapped seats.
This is not uncommon. Usually the officer sees exactly what happened and knows darn well who was behind the wheel. Seat swapping is always a plan concocted in the moments of the pull over. No rehearsal, no time, a very small space, the parties identify a plan and executed it before the trooper reaches the window.
The flaw in this case was that they were both impaired. The troopers assessed the pair at the scene and arrested both of them for DUI: the original driver, and the passenger who had just volunteered to become one.
We often think that impaired driving enforcement is similar to fishing. There are spots where. The police can nearly guarantee a catch such the roads around population bars. In this case the officer caught two, with one jumping into the net so to speak.
Sock and awe
On August 8, customs officers at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport opened the luggage of a 23 year old man arriving from South Korea and found 22 pairs of socks. Inside the socks were 200 lizards, some of them endangered.
Daniel Isaac Velasco Baltazar reportedly bought them in Mexico for between $3.50 and $4.50 each, with a plan to sell them on the Japanese market, where the right lizard can go for $630. He confessed after his arrest.
Two hundred lizards into twenty two pairs of socks. That works out to roughly four and a half lizards per sock, which means that at some stage this fellow sat on a floor doing long division.
The socks are the giveaway, and not just in the obvious sense. A customs officer who finds one animal in a bag is looking at a story about a mistake. A customs officer who finds a system is looking at a story about intent, and intent is the whole ball game in a smuggling case. Every hour Baltazar spent packing was an hour spent building the case against him.
The common thread
Three stories of four people who made bad decisions. The first fellow decided to drive when he was incapable not simply because he was impaired. The second two made the split second decision making the passenger a DUI driver too. The third planned careful sock packaging for lizard transport.
Every one of them would have done better with no plan whatsoever. The passenger in Phoenix in particular had committed no offence at all until he decided to help. There is no charge in any jurisdiction for sitting quietly in the passenger seat.
If you are planning a crime, rethink your plans. See you next week.
