Actually, even without asking Lance you could more or less guess it: they obviously had some expert coaching them from behind the scenes, otherwise, with just those few pieces of trash, there's no way they'd have found loopholes in the rules.
After all, they can't even read, because what Lance had just raised up and shown them was the file of another case entirely, yet that guy agreed on the spot.
Those people had studied Hamlet's rules and knew the sheriffs all handled things strictly by the book, so they decided to try courting death.
They were testing Hamlet's rules: if breaking the rules turned out to be no big deal, then more people would imitate them, and with enough of these gutter punks they could drag law and order down.
If the police enforced the law hard, or didn't follow the rules, they'd become targets of attack.
They wanted to turn the rules Hamlet insisted on into a joke, so they could use that to dismantle Hamlet's booming order and bring chaos back.
