Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life

"D... D... DEATH? WAIT A MINUTE! YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING! DEATH for sleeping on roses? GEE! I'd hate to see what you guys do to litterers!"

— Gonzo, Muppet Classic Theater

Some crimes are less serious than others. In "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking", Jaywalking is typically thrown in just for laughs.^note jaywalking is the act of crossing the street without using a designated pedestrian crosswalk, and is the archetypal "crime so minor it doesn't even qualify as a misdemeanor." However, sometimes the smallest crimes have really serious consequences. This trope is for when the crime is treated as minor and the consequences are a matter of punishment and ostracism.

Let's say that Bob jaywalks. Not a car within a thousand miles, perfectly safe. But a cop arrests him. This makes his boss consider Bob a "criminal," and fire him. His wife, not wanting to be married to an unemployed criminal, divorces him.

Of course, whether a crime is considered a misdemeanor or a felony depends on various individual and cultural values. When Values Dissonance ensues, a point and counterpoint should be listed.

Very much Truth in Television; Felony disenfranchisement isn't explicitly legal, but throughout the industrialized world employers put a little box on hiring applications asking if the applicant has a criminal record - not checking that box if you have said record permits summary firing, and there isn't a rule against discriminating against ex-cons.^note Except where there is, but the business can always claim some other reason, and if the ex-con files a lawsuit (which other businesses can cite when refusing to hire), who is the judge going to believe, the ex-con or the business that contributes to the local economy? As one would expect, this results in a lot of Justified Criminals, as they cannot find legal employment.

Compare and contrast:

• All Crimes Are Equal, when this trope is taken to its Logical Extreme.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin', where the characters consider their actions harmless but the authors don't.
• Convicted by Public Opinion, where regardless of whether the character actually committed the crime(s) they are charged with, the general public assumes they are guilty
• Disproportionate Retribution, when characters seek serious vengeance for very minor offenses.
• Easily Condemned, where a Frame-Up turns everyone against a character no matter how absurd.
• Felony Misdemeanor, when a mild offense is punished or treated with severity.
• Life Will Kill You, where the authors do treat the misbehaviour as minor and forgivable but it still leads to disastrous accidents.
• The B Grade: Where an honors student assumes a slightly-below-high grade means they are a total failure in life.

Has nothing to do with TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Serta mattress advertisement once had the counting sheep getting thrown in jail for tearing the "Do Not Remove Under Penalty Of Law" tag off a new Serta mattress. It's actually only the dealer who's not supposed to remove the tag, not the consumer, not that it's stopped the same gag from coming up in dozens of cartoons, sitcoms, and comedic films as well.

Comic Books

• Judge Dredd is built on this. Littering, for example, usually carries a sentence between six months and two years, and Walter the Robot was arrested for throwing a cream pie to stop a criminal about to kill Dredd.
• In The One Hundred Nights of Hero, being a woman and knowing how to read is enough to get you executed in Migdal Bavel, where the story is mostly set. Sassiness is apparently also a crime there, but it's unclear how big a deal it is.
• The Punisher:
  • In one story, Frank has been brainwashed by his archenemy Jigsaw and is set out for blood. He starts killing jaywalkers, red light runners, and litterers.
  • Jigsaw himself has been known to impersonate Frank and behave similarly. Frank also once ran up against a group of vigilantes who included among their number Elite, a rich man who just kills people who do things he doesn't like - a hot dog stand? In his neighborhood?
• The Strontium Dog story arc "The Rammy" is a Law Procedural in which a lawyer accuses the Bounty Hunter protagonists of breaking the law in an elaborate scheme to reap a large monetary reward from said bounties. The charges are murder, conspiracy to murder, assault, fraudulent misrepresentation of a sporting contest, conspiracy to defraud actual fraud, drunk and disorderly conduct, and committing a nuisance in a public place. Given their line of work and the rights and privileges that gives them, the bounty hunters are eventually cleared of all charges except, of course, drunk and disorderly conduct and public nuisance. They're punished to the full extent of the law for this, which is a 3 million credit fine for each person (almost all their earnings from the entire scheme).

Comic Strips

• In a Sunday Strip of Garfield, it was implied that the police were after Jon for trying to redeem expired coupons at the supermarket.

Fan Works

• Brought up by Amy in Faith the Vampire Slayer when she warns Eric off taking candid photos of the girls in school. She explains that while he doesn't mean any harm, taking photos of them without consent is sexual harassment and could get him suspended or expelled. If those pictures end up online, he could be looking at jail time for dissemination of child pornography and labelled a sex offender for the rest of his life.
• Subverted in the The Winx Club Loops: While illegally making and selling mint-flavored milk is a serious crime, non-Looping witch Rachel got in trouble because she almost killed Stella by doing it with her chemistry set and because Stella got expelled from Alfea for one year, potentially causing a war had Griffin not come down hard on her.

Films — Live-Action

• In the film The 51st State, also known as Formula 51, Samuel L. Jackson, just fresh from graduating college with a degree in pharmacology, is pulled over by a patrolman and caught smoking marijuana. His arrest and conviction prevents his employment as a pharmacologist. Unable to work as a pharmacologist, he turns to a life of crime.
• At the beginning of Ant-Man, Scott Lang gets fired from his job running the counter at a Baskin-Robbins because of his criminal record. And that was the best job he had been able to find after getting out of jail, despite having a post-graduate degree in Electrical Engineering.
• Cat's Eye: The main method of Quitters Inc., is to enforce this trope on their clients as harshly as possible. All to get them to quit smoking. First they torture their loved ones with electrocution, then proceed to mutilation with further "transgressions". If the smoker still can't quit, Quitters Inc.'s management "give up" on their clients.
• Played for absurdity in Dogma, when the angel Loki murders an entire board of directors for being idolaters and for their various personal sins, except for one member of the board who turns out to be a pure soul. He then threatens to murder her for not saying "God bless you" when he sneezed. Bartleby talks him out of doing so.
• In Female Perversions, the main character's sister gets arrested for shoplifting. She can't pay the fine/bail, so she is kept in jail. Because of this, she risks missing getting her doctorate, tarnishing her academic career.
• Invoked in First Blood, the original Rambo-movie: Rambo gets picked up by the police for 'Vagrancy', which leads to them messing with him and dredging up his Vietnam-war trauma, which leads to rapidly escalating troubles, which leads to several wounded cops, one dead, and eventually Rambo working a prison-quarry. Towards the end of the movie, during the police's Hope Spot when they think they've managed to kill him, Rambo's former CO has this to say:
  Trautman: Vagrancy, wasn't it? That's gonna look real good on his grave stone in Arlington: Here lies John Rambo, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, survivor of countless incursions behind enemy lines. Killed for vagrancy in Jerkwater, USA.
• Horrible Bosses: Dale got drunk at a bar that was next to a playground, and committed public urination. It was night, and there were no kids there, but he's still a registered sex offender. And Motherfucker Jones spent 10 years in prison for pirating Snow Falling on Cedars.
• The Ides of March explores the inherent hypocrisy and double standards of politics.
  Stephen: You broke the only rule in politics. You wanna be president? You can lie, you can cheat, you can start a war, you can bankrupt the country, but you can't fuck the interns. They get you for that.
• The Kevin Bacon movie Murder in the First has the main character imprisoned in Alcatraz as a youth for stealing $5 from a general store (granted, the store doubled as a post office, making the crime a felony.) The film actually is concerned with his other crimes, and excessive punishments, since... but still.
  • The movie explores a very difficult conundrum - if you are sent to jail wrongfully and kill another inmate while in detention, are you legally accountable for that crime that would have never happened if the wrongful sentence hadn't been given in the first place? Keep in mind that the accused here has limited mental capacities and ability to tell right from wrong due to three straight years of solitary confinement.
• This is the premise of "One Million Yen and the Nigamushi Onna", where Suzuko's life is actually ruined for having thrown out her roommate's belongings.
• Played for laughs in Mystery Team, where sneaking into movies, sticking fingers into pies and taking two milks at lunch are Serious Business.
• Pee-wee's Big Adventure had the hard-boiled Mickey character on the run after breaking out of jail. He was imprisoned for the crime of removing the "Do Not Remove" tag from a mattress.
• Mel Brooks's Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Robin meets Asneeze in a Muslim prison. Robin was there for being present at a crusade. Asneeze was in there for...wait for it...jaywalking.
• The Thinning: In response to the United Nations forcing everyone to decrease their population "by any means necessary", the bottom 10% of academics are purged. Except not really. In reality, the bottom 90% in terms of rebels (intelligent but incapable of questioning the system critically) and children of rich people are spared, while the top 10% are enslaved and forced to work in a collective "thinkshop", creating technology for the corporation controlling the education system.

Literature

• In The Invisible Library, there is an incident in Irene's past, which is hinted at several times, which is her reason to hate one of her colleagues. It turns out that Irene had tried to persuade a woman to give her a specific, valuable book (it is implied she seduced the woman) and her colleague just broke into the house, stole the book, and somehow caused the seduction to be made public, completely ruining the reputation of the book owner. (And, of course, Irene's, but as Magic Librarian, Irene could escape.) The parallel universe wherein this happened seemed to consider theft a rather harmless crime, while "indecent behaviour" was punished much more severely.
• One of Larry Niven's themes in his Known Space universe is that of body-part replacement technology. At one point (the novel A Gift From Earth centers around it), the demand for replacement parts is so high that crimes like running stop signs and false advertising are punishable by the death penalty (so that your parts could go into the organ banks).
• This is a major element of Les Misérables, in which the main character serves years on a chain gang for stealing bread to feed his family. Even after serving his time, he continues to be stained as a criminal because of this act.
• In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Randle "R.P." McMurphy is convicted of statutory rape, a crime many considered laughable and "not a real crime" back in the days when the book was written and the film adaptation was made. He accepts the offer to be placed in an asylum instead of a jail, but once there he is horrified with how the staff treats the inmates. After attacking the manipulative Nurse Ratched, McMurphy is given a lobotomy and rendered a vegetable. "Chief" Bromden gives him a mercy killing and then finally follow his previous advice and escapes.
• The Scarlet Letter. Poor Hester's "crime" of adultery was made worse because of the red letter A she was made to wear because of it. (And her loyalty to the child's father, which prevented her from leaving and starting her life elsewhere.)
• In K.J. Parker's novel Sharps, former Master Swordsman turned merchant Phrantzes is roped into coaching a fencing team on a (supposed) good will mission to an enemy country because of this. Phrantzes marries a former courtesan, and to "help him out", is given a sex manual by his best friend. The manual is technically banned but widely read. Shortly afterward, Phrantzes is arrested for owning the book, and also faces imprisonment and a huge fine for initially lying to officers, and while the case is pending, his wife is also imprisoned. The book implies that Phrantzes's friend and/or his wife (who suggested the sex manual) were in on a Government Conspiracy that needed a reason to blackmail him.
• A couple of different planets in Star Wars Legends give severe punishments for cheating at gambling.
  • Boba Fett's entry in Tales of the Bounty Hunters has a young Han Solo sentenced to a Forced Prize Fight on Jubilar for cheating at cards, a felony offense.
  • In Jedi Search, Lando is tracking a possible Jedi candidate on Umgul who is unnaturally lucky at their sport of Umgullian blob racing (basically a greyhound race involving giant amoebas). He turns out to be using tech to make the blob move faster, and is informed that Umgul gives the death penalty for cheating. (Lando manages to extricate him from this by handing him back to his very rich and overbearing wife for a million credits.)

Live-Action TV

• In Better Call Saul, Chuck snags his neighbor's newspaper off her driveway and leaves $5 in compensation. She calls the cops on him anyway. They break in, taser him, and arrest him, ultimately leaving him hospitalized.
• Subverted in the Black Mirror episode "Shut Up and Dance". A group of blackmailers are sending orders to do dangerous and/or illegal things to different characters so they won't reveal their secrets (a CEO who made racist comments and a businessman who was cheating on his wife). The protagonist was simply recorded masturbating and he is going into all the terrifying tasks because he doesn't want the video to be released. At the end it's revaled that the reason he didn't want it spread was because he was masturbating to child porn.
• Oliver from the Breakout Kings episode "Steaks" was sent to prison for a joyride that went wrong. He was repeatedly raped, and became a torturer and murderer on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• A Victim of the Week on CSI: NY was a Hanging Judge that was believed at first to have been targeted by the Russian Mafia. In the end, it turned out that a) said Hanging Judge was corrupt and received kickbacks for sentencing kids to a specific juvenile detention center (the bigger the sentences, the better) and b) the murderer was a young man that had his whole life destroyed (up to and including being abused at the center) because the judge sentenced him there for stealing a pack of gum.
• Grimm: A blonde and her boyfriend broke into a house just for fun, the house they broke into happens to be inhabited by a family of Jägerbar who capture them, and decide to use them as part of their "rite of passage" in which case they hunt them in the woods. By the time the police rescue them, they are still arrested for breaking and entry and vandalism.
• In one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the detectives uncover that a man has misplaced some paperwork. For this misdemeanor, they get his cell phone tagged so they can follow him around everywhere. They also do some intensive lobbying - trying to convince a lot of women to hate him, eventually leading one of them to murder him.
  • There was also the time they're tracking a suspected rapist and murderer who they know did it, but can't hold him. Every effort to get evidence before he flies off fails, until Stabler arrests and holds him for jaywalking across an airport crosswalk.
• Loki (2021): The TVA treats any variance in time equally, punishable by death and extermination of your entire branched timeline. Classic Loki faked his "destined" death and lived in isolation for years, not causing a big enough change for the TVA to notice. He was only arrested when he tried to leave the planet he was hiding on, because he missed his brother.
  • Sylvie has it even worse, having been hounded since early childhood for the crime of existing.
• In NCIS, a suspect alibis out of the Murder of the Week, but as his alibi consists of having a consensual affair with an underage senator's daughter (his alibi was a paparazzi photo of them going into a hotel), Ziva promptly arrests him for statutory rape to get him back for being mouthy.
  Suspect: (while being cuffed) Uh, she told me she was eighteen.
• No Ordinary Family: Like most of the Global Tech super-powered individuals, Rebecca was recruited out of prison in the Back Story. She was serving a sentence for passing bad checks prior to the series and ends up stuck with destructive powers that she hates, and becomes a fugitive for killing someone while trying to steal drugs to suppress those powers.
• Orange Is the New Black has a few examples.
  • Piper was a mule one time, ten years ago, but this caught her back when her name was mentioned in the break up of the drug cartel that used her.
  • Poussey was incarcerated for carrying some drugs in her backpack, likely to use it for herself and friends. To compare, white male Bayley was arrested for the same thing in his youth and released with a shrug after a night in jail.
  • Flaca is imprisoned for selling damped paper and calling it LSD at school, thinking that couldn't possibly end wrong. Unfortunately, one kid jumped off a building under the impression that he was high, and the police went up to her and arrested her for fraud sale.
• The contestant "Creature" was eliminated during the first season of Who Wants to Be a Superhero? for her past crimes of littering and, yes, jaywalking. Had she been repentant she might have been saved, but her defiance sent her packing.
• Randy Wagstaff from The Wire is a small-time hustler in school, stealing some hall passes and using color-coded uniform shirts to pass as different grades, in order to sell candy to kids at lunch time. One time, he agrees to act a lookout as two boys go have sex with a girl in the school bathroom. When the boys later make fun of the girl in the hallway, she claims they raped him, and also implicates Randy. Trying desperately to not have the school administrator call his foster mother, Randy lets slip that he knows about a murder. The whole alleged rape incident blows over in a week, but Randy gets dragged into the investigation over Marlo and his missing rivals, and after a slip of the tongue by Herc, the word gets out on the street that Randy is a snitch, which results in Randy first being beat at school, to then having his foster mother's home being firebombed, landing her in the hospital. Randy is then sent to a group home, where he again gets beat for being a snitch. Next season, when Bunk meets Randy at the group home, he has become cold and silent, even acting violent against weaker boys in the home to show dominance.

Music

• Zig-zagged in the Arlo Guthrie song "Alice's Restaurant". Most of the song is about the huge hassle that a small case of littering causes him, and he's treated by the system as morally equivalent to "father stabbers, mother rapers, and father rapers" and in need of serious rehabilitation. On the other hand, littering is what kept him out of the army, and out of The Vietnam War, quite possibly saving his life.
• The Aquabats!: In the last verse of "Pizza Day!", the narrator attributes his malaise and inability to hold down a job to skipping lunch too many times in middle school.
• "Deadhead in Prison" by David Rovics is based on the true story of a woman who spent 20 years in a Texas prison after being arrested for dealing small amounts of marijuana and LSD to support herself while following The Grateful Dead on tour in her late teens.
• The TISM song "The History of Western Civilisation" is about how a lot of terrible things are done in Australia, but if you come from a western Melbourne suburb (notorious for being low class and violent) "you're the only one who gets what you deserve".
  You can build an abattoir on Anzac Cove
  You can invade Poland, scream death to the foe
  You can cut the ozone layer down by thirds
  Just don't come from the Western suburbs.
• The "Weird Al" Yankovic song "Don't Download This Song," which couples this with Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, as you'll go from pirating music to robbing liquor stores and committing vehicular homicide.

Puppet Shows

• The Mr. Potato Head Show: In an episode of Mr. Potato Head's in-universe show, where Mr. Potato Head and Baloney are playing cops, and they arrest Sweet Potato for jaywalking. The implication is that the entire in-universe episode had been them trying to arrest her.

Theatre

• The Humans (2016): Erik's life is completely ruined by the discovery that he was having an affair with a woman at his Catholic school, getting him fired and costing him his pension.
• Thunder on Sycamore Street revolves around the titular community having learned that one of their newest residents, Joseph Blake, is an ex-convict. While nobody knows what crime he actually committed, they're intent on driving him out. Ultimately, Joseph chooses to stand his ground and challenge his neighbors:
  Joseph: You good people of Sycamore Street are going to have to kill me tonight! Are you ready, Mr. Morrison? Don't bother to be fair. You're the head man here. Be first!
• Urinetown: Public urination is punishable by death. Justified in that the play takes place in a dystopian future where private toilets are outlawed to conserve water and Urine Good Company, which operates the public facilities, practically owns the police.

Video Games

• The original Assassin's Creed has guards who attack Altair just for running in a crowded area. They also attempt to kill you if you ride a horse past them at anything other than a slow walk. It makes sense, since riding a horse at full sprint is more than enough to be suspicious of your character and they're trying to prevent damages to people and property.
• In Elite Dangerous, traffic violations near space stations carry the death penalty. If you forget to request docking permission before entering an airlock, the station opens fire. Hover in the airlock or near a landing pad for too long and the station opens fire. Dump cargo within radar range of a station and they place a bounty on you, leading to the City Guards chasing you down guns blazing over the 100 credit fine.
• The backstory of Fallout included a US President being impeached for jaywalking. Then again, this was Congress retaliating after said President invaded and conquered Canada through legal means.
• In Grand Theft Auto games, the slightest bump into a police car apparently gives cops enough of a reason to try and arrest you in and of itself. Police in real life have a number of good reasons for doing this (making sure it was really an accident, that the violator isn't mentally or physically unstable and is in a good enough condition to be out and about in public, that no collateral damage was inflicted, etc.) but the ones in this series aren't doing it for the sake of thoroughness, they're just really that brutal and corrupt. Because of the way the wanted stars work in the game (merely moving away from the cop while they're approaching to arrest you is enough to bump you from one to two stars), the aforementioned "bumped my car" offense can quickly snowball into a huge city-wide manhunt with SWAT teams shooting at you from helicopters.
• In Half-Life 2, the Civil Protection guard near the beginning of the game would assault the player for not putting a can (that was already there) in the bin, repeatedly attempting to gain passage without placing the can in the bin would result in the player being being beaten to death. (Throwing the can at the guard's face leads to him to skipping right to the beating.) The guards will also react this way if you invade their personal space.
• In the older Hitman games, just running or even walking "suspiciously" can get you shot.
• In Papers, Please, even if you have a perfect track record with zero citations and let his lover into the country, Dimitri will still send you to the gulags for the extremely minor crime of decorating the booth.
• In Yandere Simulator, simply acting crazy such as laughing evilly in front of witnesses can give Yandere-Chan away and cause a Non-Standard Game Over. (Although joining the Occult Club will cause students to disregard the Evil Laughs.)
• Yes, Your Grace: Ending the game with one of the resources technically in the negative will result in a bad ending associated with the resource being greatly mismanaged. This means it's possible, for example, to get the ending in which the Bank of Florentini takes over Davern because of a debt so low the money could have easily been made back within a week of normal gameplay.
• Yo-kai Watch: You better use the crossing signal when crossing the street, or else Snartle will curb-stomp your Yo-Kai.

Web Animation

• Played for Laughs in Season 2, Episode 19 of RWBY Chibi with the last skit revolving around Jaune on the run from the Junior Detectives thinking that it was forgetting to pay for a candy bar.

Webcomics

• The Japanese Beetle has the Jaywalker, a C-List Fodder member of the Beetle's Rogues Gallery. Jaywalking didn't completely ruin his life, it was merely the straw that broke the camel's back: he was fired, divorced, and evicted on the same day, and forced to take a job as an advertising mascot in a blue jay costume. When he jaywalked, the Beetle intercepted him and, due to the costume, he was assumed to be a supervillain and given 20 years in prison. This actually does make him become a supervillain, plotting to destroy the city as well as developing schizophrenia and believing that the costume is talking to him.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • One arc does this, wherein Belkar and Roy are sentenced to the live out the rest of their (possibly quite short) lives as gladiators for not having identification. To be fair, the place they are at the time is called "the Empire of Blood"...
  • Roy initially assumes that another gladiator, the incredibly dangerous, Shipped in Shackles Champion, must have done something to deserve his sentence. He becomes reluctant to fight him after learning that he's been given this effective death sentence for public urination.
• In Sluggy Freelance Torg, because he shouted something at an airport that included the words "blow them up" and "kill everyone", gets sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison as an enemy combatant. The only thing that gets him released is something even more inconsequential: his "viking heritage" apparently let him pass their "Caucasianometer".

Western Animation

• In American Dad! there was a woman in a Saudi Arabian prison who was sentenced to life in jail, and had her hand amputated. Her crime? Stealing candy when she was a kid.
• One episode of The Batman has The Joker begin dressing as Batman and assaulting people who commit minor infractions (And his Batmobile is a go-kart...). Security camera footage shows a guy missing when he tries to throw a can behind his back into a trash can, the Joker swoops in on him and drags him screaming into the shadows. In that same Batman cartoon, The Joker poisoned the mayor's wife for having too many items in the express checkout lane at a supermarket.
  • In another episode, a man spent 17 years in prison for stealing a valuable watch simply because his attempt to flee the scene caused a ridiculous amount of property damage by complete accident.
• In one episode of C.O.P.S., the new Justice Unit police robots are seen from the very beginning to be very hard on very small offenses. "Crime: Jaywalking! Verdict: Guilty! Sentence: Four years hard labor!" They dole out similar sentences on a guy whose hat blew off in the wind ("littering") and a guy who parked illegally. Later, when Berserko and Ms. Demeanor rob a bank, the Justice Units let them go and claim the overwhelming evidence as "circumstantial" - as we see, the Justice Units were a plot by the Big Boss to get free rein to do whatever he wants.
• In Danny Phantom's Bad Future Episode, Danny cheats on his CAT test, indirectly causing his friends and family to die. Which causes him to ask his nemesis for help. Which prompts his nemesis to remove his ghost half from him. Who then kills his human half. And then becomes just about the most evil villain the series ever had.
• There's that Bad Future Episode of Darkwing Duck where he turns into the fearsome Darkwarrior Duck, ruling St. Canard with an iron fist and levying harsh punishments on even the most minor offenses. Lifetime imprisonment for jaywalking, maybe... or was it littering? Either way it was probably moot, Darkwarrior considered having high cholesterol a crime.
• Garfield's Babes and Bullets: Sam Spayed says that Lieutenant Washington's blue boy shot a client in the back for jaywalking.
• In the UPA short The Jaywalker, a mild-mannered average Joe literally becomes addicted to jaywalking, and ends up losing his job, his money, and eventually his life.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Rarity Investigates", Rainbow Dash is framed for the "crime" of forging a note to Spitfire claiming her mother was sick, so that Rainbow Dash could fly in her place as an alternate at a Wonderbolts air show. If Rainbow was found guilty of sending the note, she would have been banned from the Wonderbolts forever, crushing her lifelong dream.
• In The Powerpuff Girls (1998), Bubbles once went into Knight Templar mode, where she beat up a guy for stepping on a single blade of grass, and another guy for littering, before his wrapper touched the ground.
• In an episode of Rugrats, Chuckie's dad Chas is dating a traffic cop named Naomi. Angelica convinces the babies, including Chuckie, that Naomi will send the babies to jail if they do something wrong. A little later, Chuckie accidentally breaks Chas' glasses, and he is worried that if Naomi finds out, she will arrest him.
• In the early seasons of Sesame Street, there was an animated segment featuring Batman and Robin pursuing the Joker, who jaywalks the street and ends up being hit by a car, sent down a manhole, and arrested by the police. Batman even notes that the Joker was one of the lucky ones, and all but states that a person could get killed if he doesn't cross the street properly.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Homer at the Bat", Steve Sax is pulled over by Eddie and Lou for speeding and ends up being charged for every unsolved murder that's ever happened in New York, with the only evidence they have being that he is from New York.
  • "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" had Homer speeding and getting pulled over. He admitted to speeding and wanted to just take the fine but instead they threw him in jail for the night. Maybe not that bad compared to the others on this page but Homer thought he only had a matter of hours left to live and he wanted to spend it with his family.
  • In "The Seven-Beer Snitch" in order to fill a quota the police dig up old and obscure laws, including one against kicking a can in the street at least 5 times ("illegal transport of litter"), which Homer unknowingly breaks as Wiggum, Eddie and Lou are watching him.
  • In the two-part episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" Charles Montgomery Burns spends the entire first episode performing all kinds of absurdly villainous acts that ends up enraging the entire town, including stealing the oil from Springfield Elementary, getting Moe's Bar and the Retirement Castle closed because of collateral destruction, blocking the sun, nearly crippling Santa's Little Helper and forgetting Homer's name one time too many. It turns out what gets him shot and nearly killed is trying to steal candy from Maggie. In the struggle Burns' own pistol falls out of its shoulder holster and fires.
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror IX" short "Hell Toupee", Snake Jailbird ends up violating Springfield's three strikes law by smoking in public and is instantly sentenced to death by electric chair. Bear in mind that the actions he did to get the first two strikes were set an orphanage on fire and send a bus full of nuns off a cliff (to which Snake says that he did it in self-defense).
• The justice system in SpongeBob SquarePants pretty much is this trope. If you litter, if you have no front license plate, IF YOU RUN A STOP SIGN, EVEN ON FOOT; you better believe they will be ready to take you to jail.
• Taz-Mania: In "The Origin of the Beginning of the Incredible Taz-Man", Taz gets arrested for attempting to remove junk mail from someone's letterbox.
• World of Quest: Exaggerated with the town of Effluvium, where mundane things like stepping on the grass, sneezing, picking your nose, and hopping on one foot will earn you four consecutive life terms at best by a Kangaroo Court. It later turns out that this is because the prison is actually a giant subterranean monster that will destroy the town if the villagers fail to keep it well fed, which ends up happening after the protagonists manage to escape from its stomach.
  Graer: Who builds a city on the back of a giant creature, anyway? It doesn't really make much sense, does it?

Real Life

• There are many Real Life examples of people being locked up for life because of relatively minor third crimes under "three strikes" laws.
• Al Capone, an infamous gangster was ultimately charged and convicted for tax evasion. Capone had plausible deniability for most of his crimes, but hadn't made any effort to hide the extravagant wealth his life of crime had bought him.
• The first United States President to be impeached, Andrew Johnson, got hit with this. To sum up: Johnson wanted to sack his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, a member of the Radical Republicans who felt that Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, was far too lenient towards the defeated former Confederacy. Stanton supported the Reconstruction measures that his fellow Radical Republicans had come up with to protect civil rights for newly-freed ex-slaves and punish the South for its secession — and since they had veto-proof supermajorities in both houses of Congress, Johnson's role as the commander-in-chief of the military was the only obstacle to those measures' full enforcement. Knowing that Johnson would replace Stanton with a more pliant Secretary of War in order to impede Reconstruction, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, a law designed specifically to entrap Johnson, barring the President from removing Cabinet members (i.e. Stanton) without the Senate's confirmation. When Johnson did indeed replace Stanton with Ulysses S. Grant, Congress used the legal figleaf of the Tenure of Office Act to pounce on him.
• Bill Clinton was impeached for having an extramarital affair in the Oval Office. Sort of. Impeachment is just the first two stages. Bill only technically got in trouble for perjury, because he lied under oath about having an extramarital affair... had he just said "I like Monica Lewinsky," he'd have been fine from a legal standpoint.^note It should be noted that impeachment is not a criminal proceeding, but really a political one. The Constitution gives impeachment as the punishment for "high crimes and misdemeanors" without specify what those crimes might be, apart from treason and bribery. So an impeachable offense is, in practical terms whatever a majority of the House of Representatives says is one. He no doubt lost a few points for trying to question the definition of "is" as well. If the Starr Report had focused more on that, then it would have been easier to convince the public that perjury was the true intent. It was hard to doubt that Clinton was impeached for adultery in all but name.
  • The person who paid the highest price was the Other Woman, Monica Lewinsky. Despite being highly educated, she hasn't been able to find a steady and respectable job and had to resort to being a Z List Celebrity to pay off her legal fees to insure her freedom from imprisonment (because Starr wanted to jail her for lying on her affidavit about the affair), all because corporations and organizations didn't want to hire her because of her association with the affair. She talks about this in her interview with John Oliver and it was so bad that even her parents and friends were getting hit with subpeonas because she talked to them.
• In California, the Vehicle Code states that there is an implied crosswalk at any public access driveway, so it isn't jaywalking if you cross next to where a store's driveway lets out onto the street. Whether any passing drivers recognize that there's such a thing as an implied crosswalk is another matter.
• The case of Raquel Nelson, who elected to jaywalk from the bus stop to reach home across the street, as opposed to walking over half a mile, burdened with bags of groceries while keeping track her three tired young children, to cross through the nearest painted crosswalk.^note Georgia's roads are infamously unfriendly to pedestrians, bicyclists, and basically anyone not in a high-speed vehicle A drunk driver^note who was also partially blind, took pain meds, and had a history of DUI hit the group, killing her son. The kicker? She gets convicted of second-degree vehicular homicide, reckless conduct, and yes, jaywalking - despite not even owning a car. The drunk driver, who was on his third DUI accident, plead out^note He was originally charged with hit-and-run, first degree homicide by vehicle and cruelty to children. and served a mere 6 months for hit-and-run (with the rest of the 5-year sentence on probation), while she got 36. The conviction was later changed to community service and probation.
• Way too many cases with the Sex Offender List. Public urination or sleeping with your underage girlfriend despite the fact that you're only one year older than her? You're treated the same as child molesters and violent rapists. You can get on the list even if you weren't convicted.
• Vagrancy laws are written to invoke this trope. Many cities keep a law stating that you must have a photo ID and $10 cash on hand while in public. If you can't produce these items, it's vagrancy. Cops use this to pull someone off the street that they believe is up to no good. But said laws are usually targeted towards suspected homeless people. Moreover, criminal convictions — even for minor crimes — can create barriers to obtaining critical public benefits, employment, or housing, thus making homelessness more difficult to escape. They were particularly effective in the Deep South in arresting and harassing blacks, and combined with the concept of "sundown towns" i.e. towns where blacks weren't allowed to stay the night.
• Often happens to people overstaying a visa or who are otherwise illegal immigrants if the police pick them up on an unrelated crime and check their immigration status.
• This is one hell of Values Dissonance for Latin American (and possibly other countries) immigrants, since in many of those countries, jaywalking is tolerated, but not in the U.S., to the point there's no equivalent to jaywalking in Spanish and other languages. This is sometimes used as a visible example of the necessity of reforming the laws of many countries regarding this, using the U.S. as a main example. It's even corroborated by the very law in those countries. In Brazil, for example, while there are projects to enforce jaywalking as a minor crime, it's stated that pedestrians always have preference over any kind of vehicle, whether or not a crosswalk was being traversed. Jaywalkers aren't driving any vehicles, so, for all intents and purposes, in case of accidents the blame falls squarely on the party who is, for disregarding the previous statement and for lack of attention while driving.
• The broken windows theory of law enforcement often results in this, as has been demonstrated by New York City's "stop, question, and frisk" program. Some of the "crimes" they would routinely arrest people for include loitering in a park after posted closing time and riding a bike on a sidewalk.
• A man named Evan Emory who made a prank video of himself singing an obscene song in front of a kindergarten class was arrested and charged as a sex offender, even though he didn't really sing the obscene song when the children were present.
• The rather tragic case of Ashley Smith is a sad example of this. She was a teenager originally arrested and sentenced to a short sentence in a juvenile detention facility for throwing crabapples at a mailman in late 2003. However, her sentence — which was originally supposed to be for only a few weeks — quickly extended into years after she racked up 50 additional charges while in custody for fighting with the guards or damaging the facility. Her sentence was eventually converted into an adult sentence and she was moved to an adult prison, where she committed suicide in 2007, four years after first entering the prison system for what amounted to a minor harassment offence.
• John Oliver has covered several such incidents on his show where relatively minor offences like traffic stops, can end up ruining peoples lives due to fines. Low-income people have a hard time paying the fine on time which leads to more fines and, if it keeps building, jail time. He has also done stories on how just having the right to a lawyer can lead to problems as court-appointed lawyers are overworked and underpaid, so they have very little time to look at your case and even less interest in doing so. Then there are some states that require a defendant to pay for a court-appointed lawyer out of pocket, and if they can't they get fined and then the first story comes back.
• This is one of the principles behind the campaign for reforming or eliminating cash bail. If somebody is charged and assessed bail, they can pay it if they can come up with the money, or they can get a loan from a bail bondsman. Somebody unable to do either is forced to sit in jail until the trial, which might be a longer term than the punishment for some low-level offenses. Not only is the idea of avoiding pre-trial detention simply because you have money considered unfair, the prospect of spending time locked up awaiting trial can persuade innocent people to plead guilty, just to get it over with. A person who doesn't have bail money probably doesn't have much savings, and the time away from work (often leading to getting fired) can cause bills to pile up, make it harder to get another job, and cause that person to turn to crime just because they have no other options.
• The newsmagazine 20/20 on ABC once did a segment where a man in Texas was sentenced to just over a year in jail after mugging someone, and later apologizing and returning his victim's empty wallet. Some time after that, the same judge sentenced him to life in prison for having a marijuana joint on him. Even his former victim thought that was an insane punishment for such a small offense. The segment also mentions that such a crime would be punished with only a few years in prison if the perpetrator had a rap sheet, and the same judge had presided over the brother of a powerful businessman, said brother had committed numerous felonies over the years, including manslaughter, and had only gotten a few months probation.
• In Shenzhen, China, hi-tech surveillance literally detects jaywalkers, then publicly names and shames them. Now it's happening in other cities too. There is a screen at the busy intersection in the city of Ningbo. The information is redacted (only the surname of the person is shown).

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