Did they ever break into another car, tdn, or was that enough of a deterrent?
I haven’t heard anything more about it, so I’m assuming that if they have, they didn’t get caught.
Sure they could, in many if not most places. Just cause it’s the law doesn’t make it right.
95% of the time someone caught in your house deserves a beating (the other 5% they are taking well-deserved revenge, lost, planning a surprise party, etc.) We shouldn’t condone it because it would lead to beating with the excuse that you were being robbed.
Doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t try to do the same thing and that the thieves would deserve a beating if I could do it.
And then your dad would be charged with murder. You can’t beat a kid to death, even if you catch him robbing you in your own house.
I once caught two six-year-old kids trying to steal an atari game cartridge(so this was a few years ago). I took it out of the shirt of the kid who stashed it and guided them out of our store and told them to beat it. I like to think they never did it again. 
I’m of two minds here. With the utmost respect for everyone’s very personal points of view, here’s mind 1 and mind 2:
mind 1.: It seems to me as if a beating may actually be a better deterrent than prison time. I don’t know why exactly. I’m NOT one of those people who think (other people’s) incarceration is a “nice vacation in a luxurious setting.” Unless the burglar was unable to process it as a lesson, and used it as a reason to have a chip on their shoulder. (perhaps becoming a home-invasion-type burglar, to symbolically wreak their revenge on subsequent victims.)
mind 2.: It’s just stuff.
You can, actually. Several states permit the use of deadly force to protect your home from burglary.
I don’t know if this exactly applies to the thread, but I was working the register at a convenience store during a very busy night, when I spotted a guy very unhurriedly toting two large cases of beer out the door. I guess he figured he’d be lost in the crowd, or I wouldn’t be able to leave my post. Unfortunately for him, there was a cop in the next-door parking lot. I ran outside and notified him, and he caught up to the dude, who was apparently car-less, a block away.
There were a lot of people patiently waiting in the store for me to get back, and to my amazement nobody had emptied the cash drawer in my absence. I’m sorry to say they could have. First and only time anyone’s ever tried to steal something in my presence.
Thanks for your response. Sorry if I brought up a sore subject.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not just stuff. It is being violated and having your sense of security stripped from the one place you should feel most safe. I’ve always been of the mind that if you break into someone’s place of residence and get caught you deserve everything that’s coming to you.
No you can’t. Even if you can use deadly force to protect your home, that’s not what was happening in this case. The father was beating the kid. Even if the father could legally use deadly force to prevent a robbery, the robbery was already over.
In many cases where a robber breaks into someone’s home, and ends up shot to death, the shooter can credibly argue self-defense…it was dark, they didn’t know if the robber was armed, and so on. Not in this case, where the father was proceeding to beat a helpless kid to death until he was stopped by a relative.
The father’s best hope would be a sympathetic jury during his murder trial. Maybe he’d be allowed to plead down to manslaughter, I’m not a law talking guy, nor do I play one on TV.
And all we hear about is steroids. Maybe the track team should consider heroin to enhance performance?
My Dad spent most of his life in the trucking industry. Driving for most of it, managing a terminal for a while, then driving again.
One day we went to the terminal he managed and we found a man stealing gas from the tanker. 20 gallons. I don’t recall what Dad said, but he fired the man. The union grieved it and he got his job back. He then went on to “hurt” his back and go on permanent disability. Two years later he was seen driving for another company.
But the trespassing continued.
Go have a gander at “castle doctrine.” Most states have a “stand your ground” clause that basically gives you free rein to injure or kill anyone that is unlawfully in your home.
No they don’t. Under standard self defense, you have a duty to retreat. That means if someone is threatening you with a deadly weapon, and you can safely duck out the door, you have a duty to do so. It’s only when you have no opportunity to safely run away that you can blow the guy’s head off.
Some states have the “stand your ground” doctrine, which means that when you’re in your own home you don’t have a duty to retreat. If someone presents a credible deadly threat and is in your home, you have the right to respond with deadly force even if you could have safely run away.
But arguing self defence requires that you prove that you had a credible fear of life and limb. Yes, a guy creeping around in the dark that might or might not be armed presents such a credible threat. You don’t have to check to see if he’s armed, the jury is probably going to believe that you believed it was likely he was armed. And so you can shoot the guy. And you aren’t even obligated to hide under the bed under the “duty to retreat” doctrine in some states.
But this wasn’t a case of a shadowy figure skulking in the dark. It was a kid. The dad was beating the kid. If the father had beaten the kid to death, would the father have been able to present a credible plea of self defense? Remember that the key component of self defense is that you have to have a justifiable fear of an imminent deadly threat. That’s clearly not the case here.
Regardless of what you might see on TV, you don’t have the right to kill burglers with impunity. Yes, if you shoot a burgler, you stand a pretty good chance of not being charged with anything, especially if it turns out that he had a weapon. But beating a kid to death because he was stealing presents from under the Christmas tree? You weren’t in fear of you life. You weren’t protecting your life OR your property. You were beating a child to death. You belong in prison.
Back me up here, Bricker!
You’d sue someone if they beat up your son for breaking into their house? You should just be grateful your son didn’t end up in the morgue.
And of course the “tresspassing” continued, because the kid was being beaten!
You don’t have the right to kill tresspassers! If I’m in your house, and you tell me to leave, and I say I won’t, and then you pull out a gun and kill me, you honestly think you’re going to avoid murder charges?
I can’t help but laugh at reading the adjective “helpless” being applied to a burglar. The boy could have easily avoided the beating by NOT BREAKING INTO SOMEONE’S HOUSE.
Well, I also have to imagine that someone who beats a kid to death should expect to go to jail, unless that kid was threatening him with deadly force.
And that’s why I’m stressing the “helpless” part. Of course the homeowner can use force to restrain the burglar. But the use of force has to be reasonable. The kid WAS helpless. According to the story he would have been beaten to death except the homeowner was restrained. Once the kid is beaten into unconsciousness, does the homeowner have the right to keep on beating until the kid is dead?
Of course, if you’re in the habit of breaking into people’s houses and stealing their stuff, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself short a few teeth or with some extra holes in your body someday. It comes with the territory.
But that doesn’t mean that a citizen has the legal right to kill trespassers, any more than a man has the right to kill the guy who’s having an affair with his wife. Yeah, if you sleep with the wife of that guy with the hair trigger and the large shotgun collection, you just might find yourself dead one day. But while that shouldn’t come as a suprise, that doesn’t mean that the enraged husband isn’t going to go to jail for murdering you.
I used to work for a homewares store in a very quiet, very unsuccessful shopping centre. We were up on the 2nd level, which was even more deserted than the ground floor, and some days would go by where we wouldn’t have anymore than 4 or 5 customers. I took a break to use the public bathroom one day (everyone that worked there used the public bathrooms, there were no shops fitted out with anything other than sinks). I walked in to the female toilets, my mind on something else, and came across 2 fairly young boys, maybe about 14 or 15 years old. They both had their pants and boxers around their ankles and were just sort of walking (well, waddling) around the bay with all the sinks and hand driers. They stopped and looked at me, I looked at them, and then gave them my most polite retail-bitch smile and backed out of the door.
On the way back to my store I snagged a security guard (we had great security there, I guess because most stores couldn’t justify having more than one or two people on staff at a time, we were easy targets), and told him what happened. He found them looking around in a shop downstairs, gave chase but they got away.
I’m still not really sure what they were doing, and why it was something that had to take place in the girl’s bathroom. They just seemed to be having fun.