So, a Haläwa prison inmate convicted of car theft and serving a short stint for violating parole last month kills a fellow inmate who was serving 100 years for murder.

Now, I'd be the last one to speak up for a chap given a CENTURY in prison for beating a Burger King customer to death with a hammer. If he had done that in Texas, he would have entered the "Three Homicides Or Less" line at the Quickie Capital Punishment Mart. I think Texas might even have a wiki-wiki drive-thru lane to speed offenders on their way to the next cosmic plane. But doing a C-Note in the joint in a state that doesn't have the death penalty is about as bad as it gets for bad guys in Hawaii. You'd have thought that how long he lived would have been between him and his maker, not between him and a dude who steals cars and is too dumb to stay out on parole.

This is yet another example of a theme I've written about having covered crime and punishment for many years: Why do people think it's easier to be a criminal than to operate in regular society? I mean, if you are a D student in school, why do you think you'd be an A student in the underworld? If the car thief — now charged with manslaughter and facing the rest of HIS life in prison — had simply taken a nap or read a book in his bunk instead of getting into an argument with the guy he allegedly killed, he might have been released from prison in a year. You don't need to know calculus to do the math on that brain teaser.

But I learned long ago on the police beat that crime doesn't attract the deepest thinkers. At one point I was keeping a log of stupid things "professional" criminals do. But the list got too long. It seemed those who got caught always did at least one monumentally stupid thing in the commission of their crimes. Here's a few actual examples I remember:

• Man robs a gas station mini-mart and then runs out of gas while fleeing the scene. Dude, you were AT a gas station.

• Fellow kills a woman and then steals one of those huge, high-backed Don Ho rattan chairs from her apartment and puts it in his. Police detectives interview the suspect at his apartment and one of them actually sits in chair. They don't have enough evidence to arrest him at that point, but later, when looking at old photos of the victim's apartment they notice the big chair. It was like, "Hey, where did we see that chair before?"

• A burglar figures out that if the fronts of the ATMs at Ala Moana Center face the sidewalk, then the backs must be inside the department store. He hides in the fake ceiling of a department store and after the store closes for the night he climbs down and easily breaks into the backs of ATMs and gets away with tons of cash. It was a great idea. And it would have been a perfect crime if he had done it on the Mainland instead of messing up his own nest. He kept breaking into ATMs in Honolulu — and lavishly spending his loot — and eventually he was caught. (Hey, budding criminal geniuses reading this: Don't try it. Alarm systems on ATM machines are a lot more advanced these days. Besides, you have to know how to work tools and you dropped out of shop class.)

• Two teenage boys highjack a tourist bus full of Japanese visitors at the Honolulu Airport, rob them and need I say more? Fellas you live on an ISLAND. You can't hide a bus. It didn't even work on "Hawaii Five-0."

I'm sure there must be some successful criminals out there. You'll never hear about them. They were the ones sitting in the front of class paying attention to the teacher and getting As.