True Crime Tuesday: Turnabout is Fair Play Edition

Today’s True Crime Tuesday is all about squeezing juice into life’s eyes when it hands us lemons – or, at least, trying to.

For example, life was getting a bit rough on Aftab Aslam, as CBS News reports:

[John’s Creek city spokesman Doug] Nurse says Aslam left home because he didn’t want to tell his parents he was failing an English class at Georgia Gwinnett College.

Did he strike out into the world, looking to make his fame and fortune on the path less traveled? Not exactly:

Nurse says Aslam bought a cellphone and texted his parents a story about being kidnapped April 27.

– but guess what’s harder than a community college English class? Camping out to fake your own kidnapping.

Nurse says Aslam camped for about a week in an undeveloped area in Forsyth County, but the weather turned cold and rainy and he went home.

Some folks, on the other hand, will fight even when others might suggest they should simply let things go.

Such is the case of Kaleb Young, Westword.com reports:

[I]n September, officers raided Young’s home, and they came in force. “They had eighteen SWAT-level officers wearing battle dress uniforms, many of them carrying assault rifles,” [defense attorney Rob] Corry said. “They ripped Kaleb out of his house with guns drawn — this for a guy who had no criminal record — and did the same thing to his mother.”

The cops subsequently found a warehouse space containing what Corry described as “a small grow — fifty plants, some of them dying, cared for by an amateur grower with piles of documentation.”

An open and shut case in some locations, perhaps, but not so in Colorado:

Kaleb Young, a marijuana caretaker [was] acquitted of three felonies. But while the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office gave back some of the items seized during a raid the previous year, 42 marijuana plants weren’t returned — because they had died.

Of course they had – why should the officers in question have been exercising their green thumbs? Well:

Corry offers up the following analogy: “Let’s say the government seized my dog, and they say it’s vicious. But if it’s later determined that the dog wasn’t vicious and should be returned, they couldn’t say later that they’d denied it food and water or put it down. They’d need to keep it alive until either the wrongdoing was proven or it wasn’t — and that’s the case here. The jury acquitted my client of all charges. So they needed to return the property they’d taken from him in as good or better condition than it was in when they took it.”

So now Young is seeking compensation, but how do you price that sort of thing out?

Actually, the American government has been happily practicing that sort of market estimation since the 1970s.

Speaking this week, Corry says, “If you use the DEAs valuation of them, probably in the neighborhood of $200,000 — plus some equipment and those sorts of things.”