Walking into trouble.(Exercising The Right)

At Montana's Cascade County regional jail, inmates designated "outside workers" are allowed to do paid, lightly supervised maintenance and yard work (such as washing windows, mowing lawns and shoveling snow). At around 9:00 p.m. on April 4, two such inmates, Paul Anderson and James Brown, just stopped washing windows in the jail lobby and escaped by simply walking away.

Brown, who had been convicted in 2000 on two counts of burglary and one count of theft, was later apprehended without incident. But Anderson, who had been convicted in 1999 on six counts of armed robbery, would not be taken so easily.

It was about 5:00 p.m. on the day after Brown and Anderson escaped. Rob and Sandy Nylund, the owners of a house located roughly halfway between the communities of Ulm and Cascade south of Great Falls, had just arrived home from work. They found that a door had been forced open and a note had been left apologizing for the damage and promising to pay for the repairs.

The Nylunds assumed that the note's author had left, but when they entered their home they ...