I’m watching Home Alone. Can a homeowner legally make his house a danger to trespassers like the kid did? Could the thieves have successfully sued over their injuries?
Defintely not legal if it can kill someone. If it would just injure them in some way, you might be able to get away with it if there were sufficient notices posted. (I’m thinking along the lines of electrified fences)
No.
Oh, yes.
The name of the court case that decided this is escaping me, though.
If you think your life is in danger, then you have every right to. The question, “is your life truly in danger?” has to be aswered legitimatly. The kid in the movie Home Alone, had every right to believe his life was in danger. Legally, he was protected in this rational judgement on his part, the fact that his house was being burglerized, and should the burglers catch him, they just might kill him; and the fact that he is underage, the courts would recognize that he might not have been quick witted enough to call the police.
The movie Home Alone was a fictional movie.
I remember a story (alas I cannot link to it as CNN has quit carrying it) where a man boobie trapped his home, and died because he forgot where some of the traps were, and set one of them off. As he killed himself, there was no legal repercussions, but if he had killed someone else, then he would have faced charges of murder. No-one was out to get him.
cases? There should be a good size body of case law on this by now, unless snopes has debunked some.
Probably this guy, who was trying to murder people, not just defend his property, it seems.
If I can remember correctly, the case is Ceballos, and it involved a man who set up trap guns in his garage because it had been broken into in the past. Two kids broke into it during the day and one got shot in the face. The supreme court decided that the use of deadly force is not privileged for the prevention of every felony, but only felonies attempted by surprise or violence. Like, you can’t just calmly kill someone for trying to take your stereo. Since trap guns can’t exercise this sort of judgement or restraint, they’re not legal.
Here’s one, and the person involved aimed the gun specifically so as to be ‘non-lethal’ (of course, any gunshot can be lethal if you lose enough blood).
http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/dec99/burg15121499a.asp
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/feb00/lenny03020200.asp
If you need to register and don’t want to, here are the details: Man has vacation cabin broken into three times, sets up booby trap on property to protect his ATV, burglar breaks in and gets shot in ankle, both burglar and cabin owner get jail time.
I read in a newspaper some years ago of a man in England who was tired of his house being repeatedly burgled and especially of his fine whiskey being taken, so he decided to put rat poison into one of the whiskey bottles - and coming home from the theatre with the wife finds a dead burglar on his carpet. But I’ve never seen an online cite for it.
Maybe it wasn’t very good whiskey…
Would the Englishman with the poisoned whiskey bottle be liable? This seems different than setting up a booby trap for an intruder.
The rationale behind this is that it may be proper to use deadly force to protect a person’s life, but it never is to protect mere property.
If you set up a trap to defend an unoccupied house, you are protecting mere property, and thus the use of deadly force would be illegal. Further the risk of harm to persons who may be legitimately on the property (e.g. fire fighters, police with a warrant, etc.) is unacceptable.
I think we’re looking at two situations here which are related but different enough to make a case one way or another in court.
In Home Alone, several of Kevin’s prankish traps are not really “traps” at all, but more like improvised defensive weapons that require a human operator to become effective. Depending on where you live, the circumstances surrounding the break-in, and (like Ficer67 says) the threat to your own life or your property, the law may make allowances for the use of force up to and including deadly force. Here in Texas, for example, such force is legal when the theft of your property would likely result in the loss of your own life (they’re gonna run ya over with yer own pickup truck!) or is not preventable any other way.
OTOH, rigging up a genuinely lethal booby-trap of the kind rabbitH20 describes is illegal just about everywhere that I know of. As he said, a real trap does not have the ability to distinguish between friend or foe and can not make decisions regarding the level of force to use when responding to a given threat; it simply “goes off.”
Hmmmm. I wonder how an android security guard with reasoning powers approximating human would be treated under this law. Oh well. I’ll likely not find out, but my grandkids might.
The classic case on civil liability for traps.