Dumb Criminals: Murderers

Our good friends over at ExecutedToday.com, one of the most morbidly interesting sites on the web, let us know about this little nugget of stupidity that dates all the way back to 1934. Who said there were no dumb people in the past? How do you think we got here?

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Warren Messner and three other teens were convicted for beating Michael Roberts, a homeless man, to death. Messner was sentenced to 22 years in prison without the possibility of parole for jumping up and down on the mans chest, crushing his ribs. He showed no remorse at his trial, but after a few months in jail Messner’s tune has changed.

He didn’t feel bad then, but he does now. He has been in juvenile detention for eight months, locked in a small cell and occasionally allowed to go to class. Messner and his attorney said he has already learned his lesson and is ready to go home to help others.

Reminds me of Raising Arizona:

Ed McDonnough: You mean you busted out of jail.
Evelle: No, ma’am. We released ourselves on our own recognizance.
Gale: What my brother here means to say is that we felt that the institution no longer had anything to offer us.

“I want to be an inspirational speaker for troubled teens,” he said Monday. Messner got the lightest sentence of the four boys. Teens Jeffrey Spurgeon, Justin Stearns and Christopher Scamahorn got 27 to 35 years. They all cut plea deals to avoid life in prison. The state attorney said that’s as much leniency as they should get and the judge agreed. “I can’t think of some reason to change the sentence. I’m going to deny the motion,” said the Hon. Joseph Will. Messner’s parents broke down at the denial. His mother said it’s unfair, that her son fell in with a bad crowd and prison is killing him. “He’s not getting the mental health, the schooling. He’s not getting anything, anything but locked in a cell all day long,” Lori Messner said.

Michael Roberts could not be reached for comment.

The judge and the state both argued that being deprived services and being locked away is precisely the point of prison. Warren Messner will spend the next 22 years in prison without the chance for parole.

It reminds me of HBO’s America Undercover look at life inside of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Their interview of an inmate went something like this:

INMATE: I believe that if you forgive yourself in the eyes of the Lord, than you should be set free of your bonds. And I’ve forgiven myself for what I’ve done, I’ve made amends, I think that I should be set free.
INTERVIEWER: What are you in for?
INMATE: [with a straight face] Triple murder. But I must have blacked out during that third murder, because they say I stabbed my sister 27 times and I only remember cutting her throat.

Cross posted at Ravenwood’s Universe.

Ahhhh, the wacky next door neighbor, it’s become the staple of a quality television sitcom, the foil for an easily aggravated lead character and the source of all the forced laughter in the universe. But as henious as that character might sound, Lenny & Squiggy never killed Laverne & Shirley and ate their tongues.

YAROSLAVI, Russia (MOSNews.com) — A woman who strangled her rival and ate her tongue has been sentenced to 17 years in a penal colony.

In October 2005, Marina Belova, 30, fell in love with a man called Radiy Kim, and soon they moved to live together near the city of Yaroslavl in central Russia. However Marina was jealous of her boyfriend’s ex, and eventually she strangled the woman with her bare hands, Regions.ru website reports.

To prove her devotion to her lover, Marina then cut off the victim’s tongue and ate it. Then, she buried the body in a nearby field.

The cannibal could have gone away with the crime, had she not been so boastful. Soon she proudly told all her friends about the murder, and when nobody believed her, she took the small crowd out into the field, dug out the corpse and opened its mouth to show there was no tongue inside.

NOTE TO SELF: Wait at least an hour after eating before posting to Dumbcriminals.com blog. Also, get a vomitproof computer monitor.

Here’s the even sicker part: NONE of these people reported the murder to police. She wasn’t brought to justice until Belova killed another person and left her body in a field where a passerby found it. Before that, they just went about their day of making sausages, swilling vodka and shaving their facial hair (the women only).

The judge in Belova’s case only sentenced her to 17 years in prison, even though the prosecution demanded a life sentence. That’s the bad news. The good news is she’ll be sent to prison where she’ll be forced to do even more disgusting and repulsive things with her tongue.

Thanks to Jennifer, by the way, for this week’s story. If you’ve got something to report, send it along to andy@dumblaws.com.

Remember the OJ Simpson trial? I sure do. From the time I woke up to the moment just before I fell asleep, it was always on my TV. Whenever I’d get in my car and drive to work or run an errand, there were constant updates on the radio. When I had to go to the bathroom, there was an evil little dwarf that morphed out of the drain to give me Keith Olberman’s take on Marcia Clark’s opening statement. I can still see him in my sleep. Anyway, they talked a lot about DNA evidence especially that little dwarf. I swear if I see him again, I’ll strangle him with my bare hands.

CARSON CITY (Las Vegas Review-Journal) — A Reno man who voluntarily submitted DNA evidence to support his claim of innocence in a robbery case could not later prohibit the same sample from being used to convict him of a separate murder charge, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The opinion by a three-judge panel upholds the 2004 murder conviction of Willie Herman. However, Herman will get a new sentencing hearing because of an unrelated error in that phase of his trial. Herman was sentenced to life without the chance for parole for the murder of Leslie Carter in a Reno park in 1997.

Herman voluntarily gave his DNA sample over to the police for a burglary charge and after they ran a criminal check on it without his knowledge, it pinged back to this murder rap. At the trial, the prosecutor then ripped off Herman’s mask to reveal the identity of the true monster, Old Man Withers who runs the abandoned amusement park.

His defense attorneys are claiming in the appeal that the DNA obtained for the burglary charge couldn’t be used for the murder charge because it proves that he did it.

But the Appeals Court ruled that it doesn’t matter if he was giving his DNA for a murder case or jaywalking charge. Once he turned it over, he waived any and all privacy rights. The bad news for him is he’ll have to be punished for his crimes against humanity. The good news for him is he’ll be rewarded for it when “CSI’s” producers buy the TV rights from him.