A recent UPI story details the case of Mark Guard, charged with stealing electricity in London. The taxpayers will have to pay over £5,000 (US$8,200) for the two separate hearings before the case was dropped.
Mark was filming a documentary about crime and the homeless. During the filming squatters entered a vacant building, setting off a motion sensor. Not surprisingly, the squatters didn’t want to stick around. Mark does the responsible thing and turns off the alarm to avoid disturbing the rest of the neighborhood. To do that, he had to turn on the power. When the London police arrived, he was arrested for theft of a ridiculously small amount of electricity (£0.00003 worth, which I’m not even going to bother converting into US$). Even though Mark offered to pay for it, the electric company felt it wasn’t worth the bother.
And yet, somehow, pursuing criminal charges was. Indeed, no good deed goes unpunished. I can see this happening here in the US as well. Every taxpayer in London should be outraged at such an irresponsible use of their money.
Maybe Mark can make a movie about his ordeal to show the citizens of London just how silly the whole thing really was.
One phrase popped into my head when I read this, and it was "a penny for your thoughts."