The accidental housebreaker

johnboy said :

prison slang for stealing clothes.

And is also a slangterm for the UN skydrops of food, according to the ABC.
Snowdropping also has another, more NSFW meaning too.

caf said :

Why are you putting your washing out at night?

my mother would do the washing in summer in the evening, when it was cool. many other families did the same around us. we would get it off the line when I came home from school. Both my parents worked, so it was the only time we could get it all done.

prison slang for stealing clothes.

One shudders to think how it came to be.

excuse my ignorance but what is snowdropping?

Why are you putting your washing out at night?

charnwood residents have put up with drunken theft for years. many a morning, you might wake to find:

the car up on blocks, the letterbox gone, and some bugger had snowdropped your washing.

there were a couple of incidents where people discovered someone had been in their home, but they never lost any possessions, just booze and food.

one guy managed to get away with it for a while, but was bailed up at one house by the resident rottweiler after he had got in. (the dog apparently let him in, but wouldn’t let him out) The cops took him to quamby. he was back the next week at school.

My housemate once tried to open a door when he’d wondered home drunk – only it was the wrong house. (He’d only just moved in with me a fortnight earlier, and he’d not walked the journey yet.) The resident who opened the door calmed down when he saw my housemate with a set of keys, looking rather confused.

But breaking in and stealing things when drunk? That’s just a stupid excuse. I mean, surely one would only be capable of it when drunk (y’know, close to sleepwalking) if you’d done it when sober…?

Jivrashia: Actually the laws were changed not that many years ago to prevent precisely the “I was drunk so it isn’t murder” defence. There are still other grounds for diminished responsibility, but straight-out alcoholic intoxication ain’t one of them if my understanding is right.

As for this case, who amongst us hasn’t had a few beers and broken into a few diplomats’ and MPs’ homes at one time or another? It’s part of the culture of this town, and god knows with Summernats over there’s nothing else to do 😉

Murder charge can somtimes be downgraded to man-slaughter when the defendant can prove loss of self-responsibility, or something to that effect.

So, can the burglary and minor theft charge on this man, under the drunken circumstance, be downgraded to “(hazily) knowingly in possession of stolen goods?”