Yesterday's entry reminded me of another time I got falsely accused of something.  I was about the same age actually.  I know I was in high school and had to be at least 16 or 17 because I was driving on my own, which is an important element to this story.  It also involves a video rental store.

I want to take a quick aside about video rental stores.  They're pretty much completely gone nowadays, but I will say there are a couple things about them I miss.  It was a lot of fun to just walk down the aisles and browse all the titles.  Something about browsing online or on Netflix just isn't the same.  I can't explain it but the physical sensation of it was cool.  I feel the same way about record stores actually.  The other thing I miss is video rental stores seemed to have a distinctive smell to them.  It wasn't a bad smell, but it didn't smell exactly like anything else either.  I figure it was probably from the plastic used in the cases they kept them in or maybe the plastic or vinyl or whatever used in the video cassettes themselves.

There's a couple things I don't miss about video stores.  Having to rewind the cassettes before you returned them was kind of annoying.  It was a minor nuisance, to be sure, but still there was nothing fun about it and it could take a couple minutes, which seemed to stretch on forever, but it was for sure the right thing to do.  Aside from avoiding a fine, there was nothing worse than checking out a video only to discover that it wasn't rewound.  Then you had to go through the whole rewinding process before you could even watch it.

The other thing that wasn't awesome about video stores was having to physically go back there to return the videos after you finished watching them.  And you had to do it by a deadline or you'd incur a late fee.  It was actually kind of fun to go out and leave the house when you wanted to rent the video in the first place, but when you were obligated to leave again to return them, it was always kind of a drag.

So anyway, back to my main story.  I was returning some videos one time and after I ran them into the store to drop them off, I returned to my car to find some old dude with an angry look on his face standing there writing down my license plate number.  As I approached he turned and was like "Is this your car?"  

I said "Yeah."

He said "Good.  I've got your plate number and I'm going to call the cops at you for throwing a glass bottle at my bar."

I was like, "Say what?"  I one hundred percent for sure didn't throw any glass bottles at anything.

There was a bar located next door to the video store with lots of glass windows and it did appear there might be some broken glass in front of it, but I had nothing to do with it.  

If this happened now I'd probably tell the guy to go screw himself and drive off, but as a teenager, I tried to plead my innocence but this guy was having none of it.  He simply would not believe that I didn't do it and was generally nasty towards me.  I followed him all the way back to his bar asking if we could discuss this rationally, but he refused.  In him mind I was tried and convicted.  It was a pretty horrible feeling.

I was worried for a few days that the cops were going to stop me since the guy was allegedly giving me their license plate.  I realize now that they probably have a lot more important things to worry about, but it caused me some stress.  I was trying to go through my mind what might have actually happened.  I knew for a fact I didn't throw any glass bottles.  I thought maybe my car hit a bottle that was on the ground as I drove past and accidentally flung it towards his bar.  I thought maybe someone else threw a bottle at the bar, but he thought I did it and was mistaken.  I also thought maybe he dropped a bottle himself and was just looking for someone to blame or maybe was even just messing with a kid.  Or maybe he was crazy.

I don't know, nothing ever came of it but it sucks to be accused of something you didn't do and not be believed when you plead your innocence.  I can't even imagine getting falsely accused of something serious like murder.  If you got convicted and sent to jail for something you didn't do, that would just be really horrible.  Or imagine being framed by someone.  It would be bad enough to accidentally be falsely accused, but imagine if someone went out of their way to intentionally set you up and make it look like you were guilty.  That's just a really heinous thing to do.  

All of this is partially why I'm not a big proponent of the death penalty.  Aside from the fact that killing people is pretty hardcore, even if some of them might maybe possibly deserve it, I'd rather a few guilty people get to live a while longer than to put any innocent person to death.  

Hmm.  This entry kind of went all over the place, didn't it?  Anyway, video rental stores.  Those were something, weren't they?