the law: criminals

When I heard on TV that someone would get sentenced to "Life plus 20 years" in prison I thought that after they died their dead body would have to still be in the cell for that number of years before they could be buried.

I thought 'No Drinking and Driving' meant no drinking of any kind while driving. I was shocked my father would break the law. He was drinking Soda...

For some reason I thought sometimes when the police found a dead body it wasn't real but a fake one the bad guy had made that was so realistic even the police, coroners etc couldn't tell

When I was young, to stop me and my sister playing with the electric windows in the car our mom told us it was illegal to open car windows on the freeway. I didn't realise this wasn't the case until I was 17 years old when taking a road trip with my buddies. Embarassing.

On the way to my grandparents lake-house my aunt would always point out the large prison on the left. There was large red and white flagpole out front and I never looked past it, because I believed the flagpole was the prison (and thought it was a faraway tower). I wondered how they fit all the bad guys on top of each other.

When I was little and I'd hear on the news about someone receiving "life plus ten years" or two life sentences, I could never figure out how that worked. If someone died and still had ten years to serve, I thought they would leave their dead body sit in the cell for ten years to finish the sentence.

I'd heard people talk about letter and legal size envelopes on TV, but I didn't know what it meant. I figured that all the envelopes we sent were the "legal" size, because the other size was "illegal."

When I was little I used to believe that real life villains talked backwards and wanted everything to be bad in their lives.

I used to believe it was illegal to shop at Goodwill unless you were poor.

When I was a little girl, about 5 years old, I believed drinking any beverage in the car was illegal. If we would get into the car and my dad would bring a Coca Cola or something, I would ride in silent fear that the police would get us because my dad was "drinking and driving".

When I was little I used to live in an apartment in a bad neighborhood. One time on the news, there was an alert issued for two kids that had been kidnapped and had been driven off in an unverified vehicle.
I guess it kind of scarred me because I started to sleep in bed with my parents, and I put the blanket over my head when I slept, so if any bad guys climbed up to the window, they wouldn't see any kids to kidnap.

I don't believe bad guys will steal me away in the night anymore, and I don't sleep in bed with my parents anymore, but I'm so used to sleeping with the blanket over my head I still do it!

I used to believe when you broke a law, you would get fines if you were under 18 and go to jail if you were 18 or older.

When I was young, I though burglars wouldn't rob your house if it was raining. They wouldn't want to get wet, would they?

I thought that if you broke a law, you would get a fine if you were under 18, and go to jail if you were over 18.

If we were on vacation and staying in a hotel, I thought it was illegal to eat at the restaurant in another hotel. If we weren't staying in any hotel and just decided to eat out at a hotel restaurant nearby, it was still illegal, but not as bad. on vacation it's like betraying your hotel.
When reentering the lobby of our own hotel, I would hide the kids' menu I'd kept from the other place so the receptionist wouldn't see that I was breaking the law.

I used to ALWAYS sleep with a comforter tucked in really tight because I believed if someone broke in, they would have a bunch of trouble trying to kidnap me.