It is not reasonable to say that someone should expect to be stolen from.
Laxatives would not have any of those deleterious effects anyway.
From the link which you presumably did not look at:
Ah, those bloody stools. A real laugh riot.
Anyway, I wish to thank you. I had previously only heard of your legendary debating skills. It has been an honour to actually witness them in real time. I especially liked your devastating line:
That pretty much destroyed my definition of “hearsay” right there! Brilliant!
It really doesn’t matter if tampering with your own food to catch a thief is legal or not, what matters is that it could get you fired, suspended or expelled from school or beaten up if it actually harms someone beyond what you intended.
Revenge is just not worth it and the food thief probably won’t stop anyway. Find yourself some sort of locking container that will hold your food.
I get your moral indignation. It isn’t so terribly far out of line to think that you ought to be able to get back at pilferers this way.
Hell, if I were a top legislator, my first reform would make “the complainant was being a jerk” a valid defense against assault:
“Yes, your honour - I did break his nose, but he had his headphones cranked up obnoxiously loud on public transit.” “How loud is ‘obnoxiously loud,’ exactly?” “Well, although I was eight feet away, I could make out every word of the lyrics, plainly. I could even parse the ‘Dee to the Oh to the You to the See to the Aych to the Eeh’ bits, and those usually go right past me.” “And did you make a reasonable effort to persuade this young man to dial it down without first resorting to violence?” “Yes, your honour - he just sneered and then fixed his gaze on a point outside the window.” “Witnesses, is this substantially true?” “Yes!” “Yes!” “Jurors, do you have a consensus about whether or not this behavior constitutes Being a Jerk?” “We do, your honour,” “And what say you?” “Jerk, your honour.” “Very well, then - the defendant is free to go.”
My gut says that these reforms would result in a much more civil and well-behaved society. (I do my best to remind myself that my gut is full of shit.)
It is not reasonable for someone to steal. However, in the legal sense (which is all that matters here) if a pattern has been established whereby someone has purloined your lunch items, it is reasonable to assume that it’s going to happen. If you are taking countermeasures against someone stealing your food, you have a reasonable belief that some bastard’s going to take it, QED.
The law tends to come down pretty hard on vigilantes, even if the receiver had it comin’.
You don’t think an inappropriately administered laxative could be responsible for… (wait, what is the crazy high standard required to run afoul of the law again? Oh, right…) “illness.”
Some “common” side effects of the most popular laxative (Senokot) are “Abdominal discomfort or cramping; diarrhea; and nausea.” Its severe side effects can include “Tightness in the chest; swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue); kidney inflammation; poor bowel function; or rectal bleeding.” Anyone with these symptoms has become “ill,” genius.
Well, I discussed this with a friend who’s a criminal lawyer, and he said it’s directly analogous to the issue of leaving traps in your home mentioned earlier in the thread. You could be held criminally and civilly liable if the prosecutor could prove (i.e. convince a jury) that you had put the harmful substance into the food with the intention that it be eaten by someone else, regardless of the fact that he had no right to eat it.
I know that Diogenes will obtusely ignore this, but in case anyone else is interested, that’s what a lawyer told me.
Hmmm…is it just me that thinks a different standard of “private” applies to a communal COLLEGE freezer?
Sorry I might be juvenile, and while I personally would not steal someone else’s food, there is NO WAY I would leave icecream in such a place and still expect it to be there in the morning. I would fully expect it to be stolen (or at the very least a few bowls to have been pilfered).
If I was living in the dorm, I would make do with the pint containers…that crap is bad for me and fattening anyway.
This is completely out of control.
For our theoretical court case to even occur a whole lot of things would have to happen.
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The thief would have to admit their their own thievery. un-fucking-likely. At worst they would see the clinic physician whou would prescribe them something to fix the runs. That in and of itself is unlikely, as you can buy pepto.
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The thief would then have to connect the dots to his now empty and thrown away ice cream container which may or may not be retrievable.
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The thief would have to file a police report. Really, really, super unfucking likely.
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Assuming it went this far, the cops take things like poisoning seriously and thus would have to determine the source of the problem. That means that the thief will eventually either have fess up to the cops, or get hung out to dry when they go around asking about the ice cream. Not to mention that the cops are going to look in about a million other places before assuming a laxative prank.
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If they had the container, they would have to prove that the amount of laxative was far beyond any normal dose. Hell they would have to prove there was laxative in it! I doubt very much that you could do this from some side residue of ben and jerrys that probably never touched the stuff.
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you’d have to prove that the owner of the ice cream actually placed the laxative as opposed to some other prankster in the building.
EVEN IF YOU GOT THIS FAR, all you would have is proof that the owner of a food item mixed some laxative into his private comestibles, which is not a crime.
You might, just maybe be able to get some minor cite for negligence in leaving food with an OTC medication mixed into it in a place where it causes a temptation beyond that of mortal men to resist. The problem with that comes back to the thievery again.
Og on a pogo stick people, quit being so goddamn frightened of your own shadows. It is embarrassing.
Chances are though for a few things…
- A “normal” dose of exlax is not going to do much, it is the massive doses or someone who has an unusally strong reaction that will cause problems
- Its not going to be difficult to trace
- Hmm…I eat your food, got horrendously sick, miss an exam and have the opportunity to claim thousands from you, as opposed to admitting to taking some food from a communal fridge - while I might get in trouble, yours is much worse. In any case it may well be out of my hands, if I am hospitalised for ex-lax overdose or because the pain from the pepper induced an asthma attack the investigation may be a long way done before I even say anything…
Hearsay:
I just did a long post on hearsay. I’m not going to re-do it, but basically: a witness testifying to what he personally heard is hearsay, if it’s offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement. A witness testifying that someone else told him that a third person made a statement is “totem pole,” hearsay, or hearsay within hearsay.
A statement made out of court that implicates the speaker in criminal wrongdoing is admissible, even though it is hearsay.
Intent:
Intent can be inferred from actions. People may be assumed to intend the ordinary consequences of their actions.
Putting Ex-Lax in food and storing it in a public freezer is unusual enough that a jury could conclude that the intent was to dose someone else. Or the jury could credit the testimony of the person who claims his intent was to eat the material himself. This is why we have juries: to weigh evidence, to listen to witnesses testify and to decide what version of the facts to accept.
So to whoever was saying. “Prove it, prove it:” the jury that hears that the accused complained of food being taken, admits taking Ex-Lax and putting it ice cream, could legally disregard his claims it was for some other, innocent purpose.
In my opinion, the chili peppers are a different story. There are many recipes that mix ice cream and peppers, and as a matter of law, I doubt that a reasonable amount of peppers would fall into the reach of the poisoning statute anyway.
Somewhere out there is a man that as tasted my jizz. It was on an Arbys Swiss King that was in the breakroom fridge. Yeah, Im lookin’ at you Merle!!!
Thanks for the clarification on hearsay Bricker.
And Acid Lamp - I’m sure you are correct on the (small) likelyhood of something like this going to court, and an even smaller chance of conviction.
However… My personal morals would not let me injure someone (and yes, i think that kidney inflammation or rectal bleeding counts as “injury”), because they stole a small item from me.
The fact that I could probably get away with it does not really influence my moral compass.
YMMV (your morals may vary)
Yay! That $100K I owe for my legal education has finally paid off!
I’d also like to point out that, for instance, we’re not allowed to discuss how to pirate movies on this board, even though tons of people do it, you’re not likely to be prosecuted, and it may not harm the victim at all (supposing you downloaded something that you wouldn’t otherwise have paid money to see).
I think a few of us are arguing at cross purposes. Some are concerned with the real-world implications, which may not be too egregious, while others are talking more hypothetically - in this thought experiment, would this action technically be prosecutable?
This is a good point. A legal blog I follow made some excellent points about using hypotheticals during Internet debate that includes non-lawyers. Virtually every lawyer recognizes a hypothetical as an attempt to explore the implications of a principle or of a statute: change the facts in some way, and then ask ourselves if the law holds up, or does it pose an unintended consequence. Sometimes readers without a legal background read that same hypothetical (“hypo,” in cool lawyer-speak) and think that a claim is being made that the facts of the hypo are the same, or analogous, to the facts of the original issue.
I think our discussion here is similar to the problem above, in that the hypotheticals being discussed are not about the likelihood of real-world prosecution, but the legal sufficiency of the facts adduced to support a conviction.
If you happen to learn that, unbeknownst to even the victim himself, he has a horrible allergy to sunflower seeds, perhaps because you and you alone know that the victim was adopted and both his biological parents had this allergy, and you decide to kill him by offering him sunflower seeds one day, his death makes you guilty of murder. Now, you’d never be prosecuted, but the reason for that lack of prosecution is not the legal insufficiency of the facts: you have the requisite intent, you committed the requisite act. You’re guilty.
The problem is simply in the proof. That’s certainly relevant in a real-world scenario, but "Is this against the law?’ is a different question than “Would I be remotely likely to suffer legal penalities?”
Neither would Ex-Lax.
How do you reconcile this opinion with the fact that people are prosecuted under these statutes for adulterating food with laxatives?
What is this “reconciliation with the facts” of which you speak?
He doesn’t. He forms opinions and then digs his heels in. Rationality is no longer a part of his thought process.
Good point. I forgot about that. The one time I took Ex-lax it was in pill form.
Can you provide a cite where someone was prosecuted for adding laxative to their own food which was subsequently stolen, consumed by the thief who then manages to find a way to bring the owner to court? If you can’t, then it’s all piss in the wind because the situation is completely different.
How about an unreasonable amount of chili peppers? They’re not poisonous, or able to cause actual damage. They just hurt like hell when you eat them. If someone took a bite of my 20x the amount in the recipe habanero ice cream, they’d feel a lot of pain, but not an injury.
I’m taking the position that if you substitute/replace food items with other food items in a way to make the food disgusting or even painful to eat, you haven’t committed a crime, even if your stated intent is to cause pain & suffering to a food thief. Not that you’d never be prosecuted, but you haven’t met the legal sufficiency of a crime.
Example: I bring tortilla chips and guacamole to work on a regular basis. They are regularly stolen by an unknown person. One day, I substitute wasabi for the guacamole, in the exact same container I regularly use. I have no intention of actually eating that wasabi. The food thief takes a big dollop of my wasabi, eats it, and spend the next ten minutes in agony with tears streaming down his face. I claim that under the statute that’s been quoted in this thread that there’s no legal sufficiency for this to be a crime, because the substance I used was just another food item, not a medication, foreign substance, or poison. Your opinion?
P.S. - I’ve done this as a gag, not revenge. I managed to slip a habanero in a salad when I was at a wedding reception. It was the groom’s salad BTW. I’ve managed to avoid jail so far, but you can bet I check everything I eat carefully whenever I’m out with him.