"Morons" — When The Judge Says That, GPS Won’t Help

I’m not a lawyer and I don’t have a lot of experience in court.  But one thing I do know is, when the judge leans down from the bench and calls you a “moron” things aren’t going well.

Two Massachusetts men are being held on $100,000 bonds each after, police say, they stole multiple GPS tracking systems that subsequently led investigating officers back down a trail of burglarized cars…. Arresting officers found six additional GPS systems in the men’s car, and were able to use four of those systems to trace them back to their home addresses and last active locations, the warrant stated….
“They’ve got a chip in them. I like that,” Norko said to Villanueva during his arraignment. “Morons.”
Each of the four systems traced itself back to addresses in Manchester that had recently reported similar vehicle burglaries, according to the arrest warrant.
The men, however, told investigating officers that while they had indeed stolen a system from the car outside the Super 8, they had bought the other systems from a man on the street for $300 cash. (as in we’re not thieves, we just receive stolen property … Morons again, ed.)  Read the full article about self-convicting criminals here.

These stories are becoming more and more common.  I probably should stop writing about them but they amuse me so much I find it hard to pass them up.  There are a lot of long nights and hard days in law enforcement work, and unlike the movies it is often a long, tough slog without a lot of rewards or even closure at the end of the trail.

But GPS is quickly becoming a tool almost as good as the deleted files on a pedophile’s hard drive to make police work just a little easier and more effective.