I cured our food thief at work by making him believe he ate a cat food sandwich. He got really mad, but he stopped stealing food.
I bought a can of Vienna Sausage, and a can of cat food. I gave the cat food to my cat, washed out the can, mashed up the Vienna Sausage and put it in the cat food can. I made a sandwich with the Vienna Sausage. We put the sandwich and the cat food can in the fridge at work. Everyone but the stealer was in on the gag. After he ate the sandwich he asked about the cat food, and we convinced him the sandwich he ate was cat food. They did tell him it wasn’t really cat food, eventually. We do still have to work with him.
I don’t know what might happen if it was actual poison. There is no way to argue that you intended to eat it yourself in that case. That doesn’t mean a prosecutor would treat Ex-Lax as being equivalent to rat poison.
Even if it was rat poison, I think you’d get a lot of people on the jury (like me) who would still think it was the thief’s own fault.
Did you miss post 61 entirely? You couldn’t have, you quoted the entire thing. You merely dismissed it as irrelevant, when it seems to me pretty clear that it could be interpreted in a number of ways.
But even if that was not the case, so what? The burden of proof is on someone saying it’s a bad idea to poison someone? Sounds like a sound reason to poison someone.
Post 61 was off-point. It was about distributing tainted food to others intentionally. It has nothing to do with having food stolen.
The burden of proof is on someone making a positive, factual assertion that something is illegal. Opinions about “good or bad ideas” are neither here nor there.
If someone puts poison/laxatives/habaneros in their ice cream and puts it in a communal freezer with no desire to eat it themselves but instead to trick someone else into eating it wouldn’t you call that intentionally distributing tainted food to others?
If you know that someone is stealing your food, and you taint some for the specific purpose of baiting the thief with it in the hopes that he’ll eat it and suffer physically, that’s about as intentional as you can get. Do you really think that anyone in this thread who is advocating such an act is really really hoping that the poor innocent thief will NOT take the bait?
Have done for me. I made a big bowl of beetroot salad and ate maybe a pound of the stuff (what can I say? I was hungry). The next day, I honestly thought I was peeing blood.
But booby trapping your house is illegal even if the only way someone can fall victim to your trap is to illegally enter your home. Why would this situation be any different?
I swear, the second I see your name show up in a thread I just know it is getting ready to crash and burn. You come in and make incorrect sweeping generalizations, get your ass handed to you for 4 or 5 pages and then grudgingly admit you were wrong. Why not take 10 minutes and do some basic research and think about what you are going to say before you charge into an argument for once?
Huh. Not my experience. But yeah, when I saw blood in my poop, I got really concerned until I remembered what I had for dinner, lunch, and dinner again that weekend.
I think the reasoning would go something like this.
May you directly poison or assault* someone as revenge for stealing? No.
May you directly poison or assault someone to prevent them from stealing? No.
Attempting to commit a crime is itself a crime, involving the intent to commit the crime, combined with substantial actions taken to commit it.
If you take substantial actions with the intent of poisoning or assaulting someone in defense of personal property, you are guilty of an attempted assault, without the excuse of reasonable self defense.
Now, in practical terms, the DA or Plaintiff would have to convince a jury that you intended to poison or assault the food thief. This would be pretty easy to prove if the addition to the food was a dangerous or disgusting non-food item, and more difficult to prove with food items. However, it is perfectly possible for a jury to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that you did not put habaneros in your Chunky Monkey because you enjoy the flavor combination. Especially if there’s other evidence such as witnesses saying you’d complained about a food thief or something.
*Broadly speaking, causing someone to come in bodily contact with something you should realize they would not desire to come into contact with is assault and battery.
