Or what if the burglar snags himself on a rusty nail and dies two weeks later of septicemia?
Or say the house is hit by lightning while the burglar is inside?
Or…
Or say we keep this conversation on the level of rationality, rather than descending into ridiculous hypotheticals that do nothing to illuminate the issue at hand?
I don’t think vetbridge is off base here. It’s a valid question. Homeowners have been sued by trespassing criminals in situations where there was no boobytrap set up.
A criminal breaks into the home and breaks his leg falling on the missing step to the attic. Can/should he be able to sue for damages?
I agree with others in saying that setting traps is a bad idea. However, I don’t think we need a specific law against it. The actions are already criminal. Let the outcome be the decision maker. If I leave a trap and wound a criminal, then the penalty should be a slap on the wrist. If I leave a trap and wound a fireman, then the penalty should be severe, and I should have to pay for damages as if I had shot him.
It’s no different than any other criminal activity. If I’m caught drinking and driving the penalty is much less severe than if I’m caught running over a child while drinking and driving.
Well, as has been pointed out dozens of times before on this board, you can sue for just about anything. The question is whether or not you’ll actually win the case.
I don’t get what you mean when you say “we need a specific law against it,” but also say that “The actions are already criminal.”
The only reason the action (setting a booby trap) is criminal is that we have a specific law against it. And not having a specific law against it might lead more people to do it, possibly resulting in cases where firemen or police or other people with legitimate need for access being killed or injured. Laws are not designed simply to be punitive; they are also designed to be preventative.
Well, my coment might have seemed a bit snarky, but i just get a little frustrated when issues like this descend into a series of increasingly unlikely hypotheticals that often get so far from any real-life issue that they become effectively pointless.
Real life issue: I am doing some remodeling in my home. I tear out a section of hallway floor. There is a dangerous situation in the hallway, albeit one I’ve chosen to live with. A burglar falls through the open area. Am I likely to be charged with a crime (assuming all remodeling work had proper permits)? For someone who wants to booby trap their home without legal consequence, there appear to be ways to achieve the end result without criminal liability.
We still haven’t explored all of the ramifications.
I know of an instance where a property owner, tired of people using part of his property as a driving shortcut and leaving big ruts behind, installed metal posts protruding a couple feet above ground. A joyrider tore up the undercarriage of his car and sued.
So what if you put such an obstacle in your yard and a car hits it, goes out of control and runs over Aunt Agatha who is out pruning the roses? Should you face criminal charges for installing a “booby trap”?
And there are parts of the country where “mailbox baseball” is a popular sport among submoronic bored teenagers, who cruise around with baseball bats looking to bash in rural mailboxes on posts out by the street. One appealing solution to losing your mailbox is to embed your mailbox in concrete inside a larger box. The idea is that someone whacking it with a wooden bat winds up with a shattered bat. What if splinters put out the eye of the bat-wielder? What if he uses a metal bat and the jarring impact with the concrete-embedded mailbox causes orthopedic injury? What criminal or civil penalties are warranted?
Surely there are ready generalizations to cover all of these eventualities. Throw the book at all of 'em. :dubious:
But are they inherently illegal, the way a booby-trap is? Or inherently immoral, the way some in this thread are arguing they are?
If the reason that booby-traps are illegal or immoral is because they can’t discriminate between innocents like firemen and children, and burglars, then dogs can’t either. Shouldn’t dogs be illegal?
Fair enough. I’ll clarify: I should have said “can/should they win a suit?” Not just can/should they sue.
In the same way that we don’t specifically have a law against bashing someone over the head with a sack full of halloween candy. We have laws against assault. The actual assault can take many forms. If you bash them over the head with a sack full of candy until they die, then you are brought up on charges of “murder”, not “candy sack bashing”.
If you rig up a gun in your home which kills a fireman or a postal worker, then you should get charged with criminally negligent homicide, not some new “boobytrap” law. That’s what I mean by it. More clear?
I know you aren’t asking me, but I’ll answer w/ my views…
Case by case basis.
Two examples:
Example one: You have a dangerous dog that doesn’t bark and you keep him in a dark yard with no warning sign. Fireman comes into the yard to fight fire and is mauled.
I’d say you are responsible, at least financially.
Example two: You have a dog that is tied up in a yard with warning signs. He has no history of aggression. Fireman comes to close and is mauled.
I’d say you aren’t responsible, at least criminally.
The same sort of logic can apply to traps:
Putting a shotgun rigged to shoot at anybody who opens the mail slot will end up killing the mailman. Any reasonable person should know this, so I’d happily convict them of murder if I were on the jury.
However, putting a razorblade on the back of a tape deck in a car is not likely to hurt anyone but a would be thief. I’d not vote to convict them of anything. If you don’t want cut fingers, then don’t steal stereos.
Let’s get one thing straight, the ACLU focuses on government restraint of liberties. So the ACLU doesn’t have anything to do with that kind of case. And yes, I am a bleeding heart liberal ACLU member, thank you very much. But the ACLU doesn’t do that sort of thing.
I think as a general rule though, that human life is more important than private property, even if the human life in question is a criminal. Being a criminal isn’t a blank check to have people murder you.
I was asking anybody. I always read and usually enjoy your posts.
I understand your examples, but are they based on whether or not an innocent gets hurt? That is not the case in the OP’s booby trap case.
I understood the argument as “booby traps are inherently wrong because they present a danger to the innocent, therefore this guy should be criminally liable even if no innocent got hurt, just this asshole burglar”. The question I am asking (and it is a question, not an assertion) is, “shouldn’t attack dogs be considered equally wrong?” They can’t discriminate, either, and therefore present just as great a danger as any booby trap.
I suppose I am posing the scenario where a burglar breaks in and get torn to pieces by my dogs. That’s why I got the dogs; I keep getting robbed. Should the liablity be the same as for a booby trap? Legally, is it the same?
Right, I would agree, but only because it is not reasonable to assume that someone who opens your mail slot has bad intentions. If it were rigged to go off only if someone breaks open the door, would it be the same?
I don’t know if I would vote to convict the guy in the OP of anything, except maybe Bryan Ekers’s idea of “that was very, very naughty of you. Don’t let us catch you doing it again”. And civilly, I would vote the burglar damages of a dollar or something.
I am just interested in exploring the differences between undiscriminating attack dogs, and undiscriminating booby traps.
To be competely truthful, I don’t know. I could imagine the outcry that would ensue if all dogs were outlawed, and I would probably join in, since I have dogs and enjoy their company. At any rate, even trained attack dogs could tell the difference between little Shodan Junior, who they know and would protect, and some total stranger they’ve never seen before (who is in your house without an invitation).
I think you’d be held responsible in either case. If your dog is so dangerous as to be a deadly weapon to anyone walking into your yard, you’d be held responsible for what your pet does, warning sign or no.
The only types of booby traps I could conceivably be ok with are ones that could “mark” the criminal so he could be apprehended later. Like permanent red dye so the person would be caught “red handed”. Anything that’s designed to do serious harm of kill is definitely unacceptable.
Booby traps just represent too much of a safety risk for them to be allowed in my opinion. Even on private property the chance that someone who has a legitimate right to be on that property (utility maintenance people, emergency services etc) gets injured is too significant to allow booby trapping. And like someone said above, being a burglar doesn’t mean you deserve to die.
I will say however that if someone was breaking in to my house there are situations where I’d shoot to kill. That would be a last resort though. I’d only try to kill an intruder if it was obvious they were trying to do me harm, or if there was a situation of diminished visibility (say it’s dark and the intruder is coming towards me) where I can’t say for sure if lethal force is required to protect myself, in a case like that I’d err on the side of caution for my own sake.
I wouldn’t kill someone to stop them from stealing, but I would injure someone to stop them from stealing.
I can’t come up with a strictly rational justification for the distinction. I suspect it has to do with the ubiquity of dogs, as you mention, and the different emotional reaction between an animate and an inanimate object like a trap.
This seems to be a retreat from the position you earlier held, which, IIRC, was ‘you trained them, they are your responsibility.’ What difference does it make if they do not attack a child in the household? No one would ever be charged with booby-trapping if said trap were never triggered. They have attacked and killed an intruder. How are they different from a booby trap?