Napoleon’s army refused to confine him when he presented himself to his officers after returning to France from Elba. Not sure if that counts.
Well, yeah, but that was only when everyone found out they weren’t the Smartest Guys in the Room.
David Hahn could almost certainly have been arrested on some charge or other after building a nuclear reactor in his backyard, but was instead pressured into the Navy. It didn’t work out, though, and he eventually was arrested, in 2007, for stealing yet more radioactive material.
Arguably, Wernher von Braun.
I don’t know whether you’d call him “smart”, but during WWII you have mob boss Lucky Luciano. He was released from federal prison, although deported back to Italy. The US Navy was worried about infiltration by German and Italian agents, and sabotage through the New York waterfront. Tacitly admitting that Cosa Nostra controlled the waterfront, and Luciano was continuing to run Cosa Nostra from his prison cell, they cut a deal with Luciano to have his organization provide intelligence to the Navy.
There was a sci-fi short story I vaguely remember about two truck drivers who hacked the mandatory safety controls on their truck to allow it to fly lower to the ground. They hit and killed a girl and were promptly arrested. The driver was executed. The guy who hacked the controls was found guilty but the authorities were so impressed with his expertise that they sent him to a research facility (on the moon IIRC) instead.
Anyone remember the story/author?
That was less an example of “Too smart to put in jail” rather than “Have critical knowledge and experience supporting a technical national defense program.” Aside from von Braun, most of the “rocket scientists” (e.g. engineers and chemists) who came over on Project Paperclip did not have direct supervisory authority over abused prisoners and could be considered “war criminals” only under the overarching aegis of “Having supported the German war effort”. There were plenty of actual war criminals, e.g. people connected to the Nazi party and the German High Command who retained or recovered positions of authority even after denazification, and in Austria there was almost no effort to prosecute or remove people who had joined the Nazi party and had eagerly collaborated with the Anschluss Österreichs; such people retained positions in government, industry, and academia without apology or explanation.
Given the then rather loose definitions of actual crimes involving the mishandling of classified material and the fact that Feynman alredy had the highest level of clearance and effective need to know about the entire Manhattan program effort including operational aspects (despite his young age and initial low stature in the hierarchy he rapidly rose to positions of increasing technical authority, in no small part because of the innovations he brought to computing abilities and his mentor/muse relationship with Hans Bethe) I don’t think Feynman broke any laws. At most, he openly mocked security regulations which were ineffectual and obtuse, to the point of sending a memo warning of the security vulnerabilities in the locking mechanisms in the safes he was “cracking” (e.g. reading the tumbler combinations while the safe was sitting open, then recording it in documentation which he kept securely in his own safe) only to be repremanded and have a memo circulated directing all other Lab staff to ensure that Feynman did not have access to their open safes.
The term was ironic; the executives at Enron who were responsible for the downfall and bankruptcy were not all that smart or cognizant of even their own precarious financial situation. Skilling infamously stated that Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was his favorite book, citing it as justification for his managerial philosophy, despite clearly never having read past the title page. These people had simply managed to convince, bribe, or bully all of their partners and financial backers that they were “the smartest guys in the room”, and by the time auditors started realizing just what a house of cards the entire operation was, nobody wanted to acknowledge it for fear of losing their own investments. Nobody involved was very smart, and especially the federal government for having removed the regulator and oversight controls to assure that such scams don’t occur on this scale.
Stranger
That guy is not smart. In fact he is, what we refer to in technical parlance, a “fuckin’ moron”. He could be a supervillain except instead of building a nuclear reactor to power his telemetry-jamming secret base in Jamaica, he’d be tearing apart smoke detectors and improperly disposed x-ray machines in order to find “glow-y” stuff to hot glue to his glassware.
Stranger
A member of the Mission Impossible team could have worn a W mask and stolen a slice of pizza three times.
We would have had peace in our time.
The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It takes a certain brand of idiocy to attempt to build a nuclear reactor in one’s own backyard, but it also takes a certain brand of genius to succeed.
I’m too smart to have been put in jail. I cleverly figured out how not to commit crimes.
Wow, 30 post and no one has mentioned Bill Clinton yet. We must be truly be over it now. I mean, it was like the crime of the century and no one was held accountable. Oh the outrage that was spewed. Glad to see we’ve moved past all that. 
His reactor never achieved anything close to criticality and was so poorly protected that it emitted radiation levels approaching immediate hazard. Paul Stephens he is not.
You mean, for the crime of getting a blowjob from an intern? I’m pretty sure we could populate an entire prision of politicians with various levels of intellectual capability who are guilty of this ‘crime’.
Stranger
I think it hasn’t been mentioned because not everybody sees it in that light.
No, no, no. The heinous crime of lying to congress over getting a blowjob from an intern. How soon we forget. 
But almost half of the country was in an uproar about it. Millions of dollars were spent trying to fully impeach him. High level officials were calling this high crimes and misdemeanors. Surely Bill was too smart for them.
Excuse me, state prison. The federal government persuaded the State of New York to release him shortly after the war.
Clinton wouldn’t have been imprisoned had been impeached, just removed from office.
Wernher von Braun was my thought, and Alan Turing was kind of an argument against this sort of thing–in that if the British were willing to lock Turing up (and they absolutely were if he had not undergone humiliating and psychologically destructive hormone treatments) not many people would be off the hook on this kind of thing.
I’ve read a good deal about von Braun’s history as a Nazi and while I’ve always considered him a “marginal case” war criminal I think at least part of that is the American authorities and others really didn’t want to dig too deeply into von Braun’s past back when all the evidence was fresh and the Nazis in general tried their best to destroy as much evidence as they could at the end of the war. Plus we know that JIOA intentionally obscured/erased a lot of von Braun’s history, so the parts that latter historians and researchers have been able to cobble together may very well be significantly different from real history.
FWIW though von Braun, at leas for many years, wasn’t really treated much different from someone on “house arrest” by the government. He was shuffled around a lot (with no freedom of movement) at first, and then when they put him in Fort Bliss he was not allowed to leave the base without an escort (there were also complaints from him and his colleague German scientists about the poor quality of their accommodations.)
As for George W. Bush and the three strikes law–no. The original 1994 version of the law:
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A defendant convicted of any new felony, having suffered one prior conviction of a serious felony, would be sentenced to state prison for twice the term otherwise provided for the crime.
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If the defendant was convicted of any felony with two or more prior strikes, the law mandated a state prison term of at least 25 years to life.
Some opponents of the law (check out Stanford’s page on it) openly lied or distorted the law by saying that persons could receive the life term for a third offense “no matter how minor.” That is not true, all the strikes had to be felonies which are really not minor crimes. A minor crime is a misdemeanor, further many, many felonies are plead out to misdemeanors anyway at least early in a criminal’s career and in cases of less serious felonies. So to actually have three felony convictions means you’ve probably had many negative interactions with the criminal justice system, probably a few “diversions” and pleas of felonies down to misdemeanors to get there.
Additionally, to start yourself on the road to three strikes you had to commit at least one “serious or violent” felony, it’s true the rest of the strikes only had to be felonies of any kind, but someone who committed dozens of minor felonies throughout his life would never have been eligible for three strikes. [Aside: I believe generally in letting judges decide sentences and oppose mandatory minimums and most three strikes type legislation, but I don’t believe that excuses distorting what California’s three strikes law actually was.]
Under the revised statute, the third strike had to be a ‘serious or violent felony’, which would remove many of the most perverse applications of the law.
To get back to Bush, I don’t believe he has a single felony arrest, let alone a felony conviction. Three strikes only works on convictions, not arrests. In fact I’m quite certain it would be unconstitutional to send someone to prison for life based on # of arrests (because theoretically you’d be sending someone to prison for life who had never committed any crime other than being wrongfully arrested–you’d be criminalizing getting arrested.) To my knowledge Bush has been arrested twice, once at the age of 20 for disorderly conduct at a bar and his DUI in Maine. He plead guilty to the Maine offense (a misdemeanor), and the disorderly conduct charge (also a misdemeanor) was dropped. I’m not aware offhand of a third arrest, and certainly not three felony convictions required under California’s three strikes laws.
The third would be his (suspected) cocaine arrest in Houston, with record expunged after his year of community service at Project P.U.L.L. - the kind of sentence a poor black kid doesn’t get.
Moderator Note
This being GQ, let’s refrain from the partisan jabs, even if intended tongue in cheek. No warnings issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator