Deserting someone in the desert: Illegal?

Factual Questions
1

I came up with this question after watching Elle King’s video for “Ex’s and Oh’s”. At the very beginning, she’s in her car with her boyfriend, in the middle of the desert. She tells him to get out. “Are you serious?” Without another word, Elle opens the passenger-side door. Her boyfriend sighs, steps out of the car, and she zooms away.

Over the course of the video, the guy eventually finds his way back to her, in keeping with the theme of the lyrics.

Now, if this had happened in real life, would Elle have been guilty of a crime? Especially if the guy had died before finding shelter or food?

2

Probably a manslaughter charge, but that’s an opinion. Love that song, BTW.

3

Let’s say he’s got no cell phone or service. Depraved indifference maybe. Definitely civil action. She can get away with it if she contacts the police and tells them he threatened her.

4

Is he actually obliged to exit the vehicle at that exact moment and time (assuming, or course, that he entered the vehicle with permission)? If you replaced the vehicle with a dwelling, the answer is clearly no (tenants rights).

5

IANAL, but tenant’s rights don’t apply to visitors or guests. If it’s her apartment and he doesn’t actually live there, she can order him out whenever she wants.

In the case of the car, I’m pretty sure you don’t have a legal right to insist on staying in someone else’s car if they want you out, even if they willingly let you in.

6

I would think/hope that IF you insisted on staying in the car until there was someplace slightly better than a random dirt road in Death Valley for you get out that you would have some legal/moral defense if that refusal to exit the car landed you in court.

7

Anyone who deserts someone in the desert deserves their just deserts.

8

The phrase is actually “just deserts”, so you’re pissing on your own foot by adding the extra s

edit: the previous post did say “just desserts”. It must have been changed immediately before I quoted it.

9

Yeah, I caught my error before you posted, although “just desserts” has come into common usage, even though it’s non- standard.

  • Goes off to listen to Hotel California.

On a dark dessert highway,
Cool Whip in my hair

10

What if you maroon someone in a marina, or abandon someone in the boondocks, or dump them at the dump?

11

Or swamp them in a swamp.

12

Or, to consider a slightly more reasonable scenario, suppose she had agreed to drive him from Philadelphia to St. Louis but then told him to get out in a small West Virginia town. In that case, he is probably going to be very inconvenienced but isn’t in any serious mortal danger, as the town has all of the services you would expect a small town to have (doctor’s office, bank, general store, bus station, etc.) Would the inconvenience subject the driver to legal liability?

Going back to the original question, it does seem obvious at first that the alternative to permitting her to eject him at any time would be for him to have a positive legal right to remain in the car, but maybe that’s not the case. Maybe she only has a duty to not put the passenger in mortal danger, so he would only be able to assert the right to remain in the car until such time as she provided him a “reasonable” alternative, such as dropping him off in a small town, arranging for someone else to pick him up, dropping him off at the beach with a motorboat, a map, and enough gas to get him to a nearby fishing village, etc.

13

or eject them hostilely at a hostel, dump someone out back in the Outback, put them out to pasture in a pasture, leave them to providence in Providence, lead them into the valley of death in Death Valley, let them chill in Chile, leave them without a bearing in the Bering Strait, or stick them between Iraq and a hard place?

14

Make a new plan, Stan. Just get yourself free.

15

There must be 50 ways to desert your lover.

16

I believe it would be tortious. Assuming there was not an oral contract (with consideration) for the drive, there would be a form of promissory estoppel in play.

Suppose I agreed to drive you from Philly to St. Louis. For the hypo, let’s assume that you didn’t agree to pay for gas or food on the way because then we would be getting into contract territory. I’m driving you with no compensation at all.

Then for no reason at all, I dump you in the West Virginia town you described. It would likely be reasonable for you to rely on my representation that I would take you all of the way to St. Louis, and by dumping you like that, I would be liable for your damages: hotel room, bus ticket, airfare, loss of a day in St. Louis, etc. If for some reason you were attacked with a knife on the street, then those damages may not be reasonably foreseeable and therefore outside the scope of liability.

It might get complicated if you did something to make you drop you off. Depending on what you did, there might be comparative fault that comes into play. Maybe you called my mother a whore, so I pulled the car over and told you to get out. A jury might think that although you were wrong for doing that, my reaction of leaving you in the middle of our journey was excessive, so say I am 75% at fault, you 25%.

The only time there would be a criminal violation of the law would be if I put you in a position where harm was a reasonable possibility. If I put you out alongside the interstate and you got hit by a car, I could see an involuntary manslaughter charge. If I left you in the middle of the desert, I could see a murder charge.