Suit Alleges Prison Break Concept Was Stolen

LOS ANGELES, October 25: According to an Associated Press
report, two brothers who were fugitives in the 1960s after breaking out of
prison have filed suit against FOX alleging that the network lifted the idea
for the hit show Prison Break from a
manuscript they had written about their lives.

Robert Hughes was incarcerated in 1964 at the age of 16,
after his mentally ill mother accused him of attacking her. While she later
recanted, he was sentenced to serve five years, and he turned to his
20-year-old brother Donald for help in breaking out of jail. The two were
fugitives until 1968 when, after The Kansas City Star published an article about their story, they were
both exonerated.

The brothers allege that they put their life story into a
manuscript that was reportedly sent by their agent to FOX in 2001. They were
allegedly told that the network wasn’t interested. Last year, FOX launched Prison
Break, about a man who gets himself
arrested so that he can break his wrongly convicted brother out of jail.

"It's a classic case of the rich trampling on the
poor," Donald Hughes told the AP. His brother Robert noted, “If we sold
the manuscript at this point to a movie studio or network, they'd think we were
copying Prison Break."

The brothers have filed a copyright infringement case
against FOX and the show’s executive producer and creator, Paul Scheuring,
seeking unspecified damages.