The Twenty-Eight Daze of February
Paul Marguiles, a Nashville police officer, gave America’s Dumbest Criminals this story about a man with a short-term memory about long months:
On February 25, 1995, Marguiles and his partner stopped a car with a temporary license plate on it in a known drug-traffic area. In Tennessee a temporary tag, as it is known, is made of paper and carries a handwritten expiration date on it. Upon closer examination, they noticed that the tag had been altered from its original expiration date of 2-17-95.
“It did look quite convincing,” Marguiles recalls. “The problem was that he had changed the date from 2-17-95 to 2-37-95. It doesn’t take a math major to realize that there are only twenty-eight days in February, not thirty-seven.”
A search of the vehicle yielded some crack cocaine and a small pipe used to smoke the drug. The car was confiscated, and the driver was arrested for simple possession of a controlled substance, alteration of an auto tag (which is a felony), and driving with a suspended license.
The driver was especially upset when he realized the crack was in the car.
“The car was pretty messy,” Marguiles says, “and he apparently didn’t realize the stuff was even there.”
The only reason he had taken the car out in the first place, he told officers, was that he really needed to buy some drugs.