Light poles break away more because most of the time the base can be replaced but the rest of the pole is still in working order. After all telephone poles are certainly not break away and there are a hell of a lot more of them along the road.
I think that roads lined with telephone poles are typically lower-speed ones. And actually, doing a Google search on “breakaway telephone poles” I see that such things are being proposed.
I’ve seen quite a few telephone poles just off the highway, so I’m not sure your assertion is correct.
And having the poles break with live wire on them? That’s brilliant.
Yah, but there’s a prosecutor there to carve that excuse up:
“Did you test it?”
“Did it occur to you that it might do more than just break his bat?”
Or, if the defendant doesn’t testify, the prosecutor can have a field day with the things he should have done.
Besides which, a jury is present, which might not look favorably on the fact that some prankster ended up dead as a direct result of someone’s action.
After replacing several mailboxes to baseball vandals, my great-uncle Earl came up with a solution that both stopped the vandalism and satisfied postal regulations: he took an oversized mailbox, set a regular sized mailbox inside and poured concrete between the two. He then set it on a steel post anchored in two feet of concrete.
Not only was it sturdy enough to deter the vandals, it withstood the tornado that wiped out his house and barn within a hundred yards of it.
I wonder if providing a storm resistant structure would be a good defense in a court case involving a carload of injured teenagers.
“I was assured on an anonymous computer message board that the bat would break. I was misinformed.”
“Not in a million years.”
When does the carving begin?
The prosecutor is not allowed to testify. Besides, I was replying specifically to the question of intent. If the defendant can testify that his intent was to break the bat, and not teach someone a lesson, the prosecutor will have to prove otherwise. Hard to do if all you have is speculation, with no direct testimony to support it.
The actions of the prankster? Because that is what was the direct cause of the fatality.
I think there’s a lot of middle ground between having an easily destroyed mailbox and setting out to design one that’s going to totally destroy a car.
If it were up to me I would just have a nice and solid mailbox, with the defense of “if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well”
This might mean a concrete support post with a nice brick mailbox - where it’s very easy to see how solid the mailbox is.
For one that’s very deliberately designed to look weaker than it is, I don’t think the house owner should get off scot-free, but I also don’t think they should be charged with murder.
Makes sense to me.
What was your intent? If it was to kill the kid, it was homicide. But it wasn’t to kill the kid- he didn’t mean to kill the kid, but if he had thought about it a bit he might have realized that could end up happening. Hence, it’s negligent homicide.
I work in a town of 60,000 which covers quite a bit of land. There are no telephone poles on the interstate that runs through it. But there are plenty of telephone poles on roads up to 55 mph.
Poles as they are designed now will hold up wires even when one is broken. I have seen plenty of broken poles swinging by the wire with the poles on either side holding it all up. I doubt a breakaway pole could do this. Or stand up to severe weather. If they can design something that strong then it would be a great idea.
You could make an argument that he could foresee bodily injury to the passenger, the one swinging the bat. But in the scenerio that was on the TV show not only was the passenger injured but the driver ran into a tree and killed them both. Their death had more to do with their illegal activity than the homeowners. It is a great leap to think that filling a mailbox with concrete would cause a car to drive at high speed into a tree.
Except, just to reiterate, there is no negligent homicide law in Nevada. Thus, unless he could meet the mens rea requirement of involuntary manslaughter (which is that the lawful act was reasonably likely to have caused a death, which seems a stretch to me) no crime can be charged.
We had another case like this, discussed on the Dope a couple years ago, where a motorist hit a bicyclist and killed them under negligent circumstances. But there was no negligent homicide law in that state, and the most the person could be charged with was a misdemeanor traffic offense. (causing no end of handwringing). I feel like it was a pit thread, called something like, “Kill a man? $300 fine!”