41 Lawyers And Cops Reveal The Dumbest Things People Have Done To Try To Cover Up Their Crimes

Throw beer bottles out their car trying to hide DUI, while driving down the road.

A guy I worked with was being charged with "dangerous driving" following a pursuit involving a police helicopter. He would have faced a fine and 1 year driving ban. His lawyer told him to plead guilty.

He ignored this advice and insisted on going to trial and his sole defense was that the police didn't have any kind of video recording proof of his crime as though this was some kind of technicality that would get him off. In questioning he even admitted to what he did, but still tried to convince the court that he was not guilty because there's no video recording.

The court threw everything at him everything bar a prison sentence (got a suspended one instead). The arresting police officer even told him he would just got a telling off had he stopped but his insistence on trying to play the system ended up majorly screwing him over.

Lawyer here. guy posted incriminating photos on his Facebook. Somebody told him he was a moron for it and he deleted it like an hour later and updated his non private Instagram with the same photos because "it's newer and lawyers and cops can't see it when you're not friends"

He's in prison.

Police here, guy was insanely drunk (.32 I Believe). I stopped him for making a left turn out of bar, which put him going north bound in a sound bound lane of a pretty large roadway and the road was divided by a median. So he drives over the median at full speed and his Landrover kinda-ish gets airborne. Gets pulled over.

He decides to consent to blowing into an field alco sensor and it reads a .5 BAC and then gets an error/shuts off, which I assume is it's max reading. Dude used alcohol based mouth wash to beat the alco sensor. He was still a .3+ which is impressive because normal people can't function right at this point. He only seemed drunk and not wasted and vomit covered like a normal person would be.

Not a laywer but my story

Got real drunk with some friends down at by river and golf course, by around 4am we are walking back and what do we see but 4 golf carts with the keys

We start racing them. Turns out the green keeper was there and joins in, with his pick up.

Now if we had been sober or even vaguely intelligent we would have stopped, but one friend was *not * getting caught and tried to flee to the river, tearing down over one of the wet greens , over the hill and into the river.

He went from us getting a good shouting at to criminal damage, theft, vandalism, dui, and resisting arrest, upside was we all got interviewed drunk and the case got dropped on that (we all admitted it, police felt 4 confessions and and one witness meant no need for extra evidence - the judge saw 4 statements given under the influence as not admissible when he had 4 teenagers looking at driving bans and jail time over an obvious juvenile incident gone wrong)

This story is why I stopped drinking and went to college.

Client figured he could get away with theft by erasing the ~20 minutes of footage from the home's security cameras.

When I was young and dumb this girl we had staying with us had walked up to the store and called the police on me for hitting her, although I did not hit her, I fell a bit backwards when I got up because I was drunk. I was 19. I went and hid in an empty storage locker in the basement, but got worried I was going to get caught there so I went and hid behind a door. Of course the first place cops look when they go into a room is behind the door. Then I tried to resist ended up getting carried out with one cop on each arm. As we approached a door that lead to the stairs out of the building I decided to try to push off the door to try to get the cops to fall backwards. I got maced instead and an added charge of resisting. I would have probably just got a MIP, but I made it much worse.

The classic, which I encountered more than once: pull the car over, obvious there’s only one occupant, you can see him jump into passenger seat, cop approaches vehicle, guy says “Man I hope you catch that guy, he’s really drunk.” Sure, I’ll go with that, but the jury won’t.

This happened at work. A coworker on our first day of training for a compliance department stole another coworker’s phone and when we found out he was the first to say “let’s all go inside the training room again!”. He then told the guy “OMG I just found your phone in my backpack” and of course nobody believed him. The guy got fired.

I knew a lawyer (she was not my client) who blew the statute of limitations on a low dollar personal injury case. Instead of informing her firm, she got the client to agree to settle for 40k. Faked up the settlement paperwork and gave him 40k -- that she embezzled from her church (she was the treasurer). That came to light, she paid back the church (she had the money), pled out to a misdemeanor and was disbarred.

We responded to a break and enter one time and cleared the house. We go down to speak to the caller and tell her the house was clear and the only person we found was her sleeping roommate.

She looks at us puzzled and says I do t have a roommate. We ran up the stairs.


One other time a guy tried to rob a money mart with a knife. Now money parent clerks are surrounded in about 5 inches of ballistic glass.

Clerk says to him. “ is this a joke?”


Any criminal who breaks into a house or car after 4 am on a Sunday. We usually have nothing to do then and are all waiting for this. You want to be a successful criminal do the crime at 2 am Saturday.


Another guy walked backward up to a bar door after it was closed to break I. He did this so he would not be seen by the camera .

Grabs the door and pulls and the door handle comes off and he falls. Get up and looks directly at the camera.

Briefly prosecuted for about a year. You'd be amazed at how many old people shoplift. The go to for most of them was to put the items in a shopping bag hanging from their wheelchair and claim they forgot. I truly believe that some of them did, but it happened way too often for everyone to be innocent.

Several years ago someone stole a truck from my husband's work place over the weekend, drove it several miles away, stole the tools out of it then set the truck on fire. He got caught when he went to the hospital for burns in his hands. He was an employee from that work place, too.

Guy committed arson but he's such an idiot that he bought the propane tanks at Costco.
Costco knows... a lot...

Former jury member here, had a case where a guy robbed a travel agents (red flag right there, travel agents don't really hold a lot of cash), he claimed that the guys with him kidnapped him and forced him to do it although he was wearing a balaclava and they weren't. Anyway, failing to find any cash on the ground floor they spotted a staircase leading down to a basement and thought there might be a safe down there so went downstairs. Of course, instead of that there were a whole bunch of travel agents on the phone to the cops. Cue a hurry for the exit, although not before he stole the purse from a lady's handbag, unfortunately he's not very bright. He runs round the corner to a bus stop where he promptly stops and waits for a bus! Police pick him up at the bus stop with purse in one pocket and balaclava in the other. Still claims he has been kidnapped. Not sure anyone in the room believed him...

Not a lawyer/LEO but managed a retail location with one of those self service coin counters. It was not uncommon to get requests from police to look at surveillance video for various cases.

One day, a fire captain comes in. Tells me about a case of stolen coins he's working on. Apparently a group of kids was breaking into houses and cashing in coin collections at the coin counter for pennies on the dollar of what they were worth. (Stupid #1)

Curiousity got the better of me and I asked why a fire captain was investigating. To cover their tracks, the kids were lighting the houses on fire. Went from minor burglaries to arson. (Stupid #2)

Went to the pre trial for one, his parents seemed like decent people. Never heard how long they got, but all were caught.

Man was getting charged in court as the evidence was paramount and it went to a short break and during the break the convict tried to smash his laptop up that had the evidence on it. Seen that online thought it was pretty stupid considering the judge and jury had all already seen the evidence.

My 8th grade science teacher tried to light her apartment on fire to collect the insurance money... on the apartment that she was _renting_ . also, she used a match instead of a lighter so they found the match and now she's in prison for arson.

Not a cop or lawyer, but I worked at a restaurant a few years ago and after I had left the owner stopped paying the employees. They all showed up one day to demand him to pay them and the owner called the police on them for “trespassing”. At their place of employment. The police showed up and told him he had to pay them. Place shut down the next day. That guy was such a jerk.

Claimed he was the son of the very Judge he was set to appear before. (he did have the same last name).