The Georgia Supreme Court is facing a rather odd legal question: is a land mower a motor vehicle or lawn device? The answer to that question has considerable importance to Franklin Lloyd Harris who received a 10-year sentence for stealing a lawn mower from Home Depot.
Harris swiped a Toro riding mower in 2006. He is a repeat offender, though this appears his first venture into hot garden machines.
The case turns on the definition of “motor vehicles” which is anything but clear under Georgia law. As Toro advertises, prosecutors insists you can “count on it”
State law defines a motor vehicle as a “self-propelled” device. 
This is not the first case on the meaning of a motor vehicle. Kile Wygle charged recently with a vehicular offense for crashing his motorized bar stool.
A New Zealand man was arrested for DUI on his lawn mower.
For the full story, click here.
I’m glad I read this. Just today, I had considered using my lawn mower to pull a small trailer loaded with a pressure washer less than 1/2 mile through my neighborhood to wash off my wife’s grandmother’s porch.
whew!
Just think of what I avoided.
Did he try to steal a weed EATR? No wonder he’s getting hard time.
Ten years?! Couldn’t the court just have given him a few years’ probation and made him pay for the mower? This country locks up people for years when a different sentence would be just as effective a deterrent and far less expensive for us taxpayers.
People have been arrested and convicted for drunk driving for riding a lawn mower. Oh yeah.
Oh yes they were in fact drunk.
Totally OFF TOPIC:
Someone on this blawg posted that they liked Craig Ferguson’s show. Welllll, Huffpo has a poll up regarding ‘your favorite insane CF puppet segment’. I love his puppet/musical numbers. The survey posts about half a dozen vids but the survey is hard to find on the site.
I live to serve: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/09/craig-fergusons-best-musi_n_229045.html
Enjoy.
First the city tries to charge you for not mowing your lawn, so then you steal a lawn mower and guess what… They charge you for grand theft mower…
They really have to make up their minds, maybe start socialized lawn care?
There’s big money to be had in the prison industry, I hear. The more people who are locked up, the better for those in the biz. We’re in trouble here in America.
Do you need a license to drive it?
He should have said he would use it to make coffee.