Happened to me about 20 years ago, but I’ll keep it on the hypothetical to simply discussion.
An employee of a company has a potentially lethal food allergy to peanuts. Two other employees of the company tamper with his lunch in an effort to play a ‘practical joke’ on him. The joke fails because the employee finds the crushed peanuts in his food. He confronts the two employees, who just giggle like little girls and act as if it’s all in a day’s fun.
What to do? Would calling the police have been an overreaction on the employee’s part?
IMHO, I think complaining to the manager and getting those idiots fired would have been a good idea. I’m not sure about pressing charges or suing though since the person did not ingest the peanuts and didnt suffer medically. Then agian, you could always have pulled an even funnier joke on them. For example, coffee can mask the taste of a lot of things
Assault (or attempted assault), I would think. Seems pretty serious to me. I may have tried to get them fired, but I would probably have pressed charges as well.
Why wouldn’t this be attempted murder? Substitute “small dose of arsenic” for “crushed peanuts”: would “I didn’t think it would really kill him, it was just a joke” be an adequate defense? I’m not saying prosecution would be successful, but I don’t see how it would be qualitatively different if the peanut-placer had previously been told it was potentially fatal. Ignorance of the law and all that. Of course, I’m neither a lawyer nor a posioner, so this is an ill-educated guess.
California Penal Code Section 240 says: “An assault is an unlawful attempt, coupled with a present ability, to commit a violent injury on the person of another.” It sounds like this would fit that description.
I have a allergy to crab meat, if someone put it in my food I would take it to personel. If nothing was done then I would get an lawyer. Working where your fellow employees would poison your food as a joke is not safe. You need to be sure this never happens again. As a safety measure I would make the complaint in writting and keep a signed copy.
Probably not. These were uneducated Hispanic males, and at that time peanut allergy wasn’t the tres chic media topic that it is today. Back in the 80’s, even educated people would say things like “you mean you can die from that”? Now everybody knows about peanut allergies, and knows that they can be fatal.
Knowledge has increased about what can kill you. I do not know how many times my Dad’s doctor told Mom “no one ever died because of asthma”. It almost killed my dad several times.
Now, if you called the Police they’d listen, and even send a guy out to “have a little talk with them”. 20 years ago they’d have just laughed themselves sick.
Yes, I’m very sure that’s exactly right. When I read that, it suddenly dawned on me why this would just pop into my head twenty years after the fact. For some reason I just happened to recall the event, and the incongruity of not having done something at the time made me dwell on it. It would be analogous to me suddenly remembering that 20 years ago I heard a teenager saying that they wanted to shoot their classmates. 20 years ago the average person might have dismissed such a comment. Now that’s not the case. The seeming incongruity between what I did then, and what any rational person would do now, threw me for a loop.
As I have been trying to explain in a Pit thread in many statutes intent is the most important factor and most often the hardest to prove. Especially when talking about an attempted crime. I would say it is certainly harrassment but without intent to cause serious bodily injury I don’t think it would rise to an attempted assault. Hard to say for certain without knowing the exact laws in the state and the precedents.
§ 18.2-54.2. Adulteration of food, drink, drugs, cosmetics, etc.; penalty.
Any person who adulterates or causes to be adulterated any food, drink, prescription or over-the-counter medicine, cosmetic or other substance with the intent to kill or injure any individual who ingests, inhales or uses such substance shall be guilty of a Class 3 felony.
As for the intent issue, depending on the jurisdiction and statute, sometimes “criminal negligence” or some variation on that will do. As has been previously stated, with the prominence and amount of information that’s out there regarding food allergies, particularly peanut allergies, I think that a case for criminal negligence could be made out of the above scenario.
What if you tried to play a practical joke on your friend by gunning your car towards them and turning away at the last second, except that, um, you aren’t quite as quick as you thought you were? What if you wanted to scare your friend by pointing a gun at their head and… whoops? In each of these cases, you didn’t mean to hurt them, only to scare them, but what you did to accomplish that scaring was so reckless and mind-bogglingly obtuse with regard to the level of danger you were creating that it can constitute a crime in many places.
The Virginia law above looks like it requires a higher level of intent. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if, given the level of attention that has been paid to food allergies in recent years, we start seeing criminal negligence type laws targeting this kind of “pranking” of people with dangerous food allergies. Especially if someone dies from it and it makes national news (or has this happened already?)
I’m still pondering the relevance of emphasized portion.