This thread was locked so I started this one for an update.
The actually case that was just decided by the Ohio Supreme Court was about the driver that went off the edge of the road on accident and was paralyzed. I know this isn’t about mailbox per se but I believe this analysis would apply to mailbox baseball vs. a fortified mailbox and echoes a lot of the discussion we had in that thread.
What do you think?
I think that at least a summary of the decision here in this thread would be nice. Remember, from any given page, Web users click on an average of less than one link.
For those who don’t want to sit through that meandering ass’s video, here’s a summary of the Ohio Supreme Court’s 5-2 decision:
“Writing for the Court majority, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor stated the Court has repeatedly ruled political subdivisions, landowners, and others owe a duty of care to drivers if they create hazards that “affect the safety of ordinary travel on the road.” Because Matthew and Diane Burr’s mailbox did not affect the safety of ordinary travel on the regularly traveled portion of Young Road, they are not responsible for the injuries suffered by Cletus Snay, she concluded.”
I’m not a member of the legal profession, but I would think that deliberate vandalism of mailboxes on private property would not qualify as “ordinary travel on the road”.
Here is the opinion.
Highlights:
A homeowner does not owe a responsibility (duty of care) to someone that leaves the roadway - even after hitting black ice.
Exceeding the USPS guidelines is permissible. They are after all just guidelines with no force of law.
The one dissent said that by fortifying the mailbox, a jury may find there was now a duty to care (based on Manufacturer’s Natl. Bank of Detroit v. Erie Cty. Rd. Comm.,) therefore the case should have gone to a jury trial. J. Donnelly went on to say “The intentional construction of an immovable object in the right-of-way raises an issue of foreseeability. For this reason alone, summary judgment was improper.” but as Steve Lehto in the linked video pointed out (and we did in the closed thread), what if you plant a tree there? And it doesn’t say that he thought the homeowner had a duty of care, but rather a jury rather than judges should decide that.
Maybe a lawyer dog can step in, but it didn’t say J. Brunner dissented but it does say she joined with Donnelly’s opinion. What does that mean?
ETA: Jackmannii posted while I was typing this
Seanette, if this is the legal logic for someone hitting black ice, how could it NOT apply to someone deliberately hitting a mailbox re: duty to care.
The dissenting opinion was written by Donnelly so Donnelly is said to have dissented. Brunner joined Donnelly’s opinion and thereby also dissented from the judgment. Brunner could also have dissented by writing a separate opinion but didn’t. Joining the dissent still counts as a dissent though.
There are infinite permutations. Sometime justices will join a majority opinion only in part and write a concurring opinion based on different reasoning. This can go so far as a justice joining a majority opinion only in the judgment with a separate opinion that comes to the same conclusion through an entirely different reasoning. Sometimes they will join a dissent but also write a separate dissent that relies on different legal arguments. In this case, Brunner joined with the dissenting justice seemingly in full without any expressed disagreements and without a separate opinion to add anything.
This case doesn’t, in my opinion, have any bearing on the legality of using a surreptitiously reinforced mailbox to bait and injure someone playing mailbox baseball but I have no doubt that people who want to believe they can set such a trap will loudly proclaim that it resolves the question in their favor. In this case, the reinforcements of mailbox were plainly obvious. It would deter mailbox baseball by discouraging the batter from taking a swing in the first place. That seems fine to me. For what it’s worth, I could have seen this case going either way but more likely to end as it did.
Here is my question then. Based on this ruling, do you believe there is a duty to care for someone who wants to hit my mailbox, whether with a bat or their car? It seems that except for issues raised in the dissent, reinforcing your mailbox is perfectly legal.
Also, isn’t “baiting” someone encouraging someone to do something they weren’t normally going to do? If they were going to hit my mailbox anyways, I’m not really bating them.
I can’t draw any conclusions from this case about someone who wanted to hit your mailbox because this case wasn’t about someone who wanted to hit a mailbox. It was about someone who did so completely inadvertently. That’s fundamentally the problem with saying it has answered the mailbox baseball question.
The original OP discussed a few different scenarios, some of which were about disguising an indestructible mailbox as a flimsy mailbox with the intent of injuring the mailbox batter. This case tells me almost nothing about how such a case would be resolved. .
This is a workable definition. A person who wouldn’t normally bat a visibly reinforced mailbox knowing it would withstand that assault could be baited into batting a mailbox that was intentionally built to look flimsy but is actually bomb proof.
I believe (and, IANAL) the difference is utility.
It is legal to reinforce your mailbox.
You would be liable for injuries if you put up a target with a sign that said “Hit Me!” that would swing around and impale anyone who hit the sign. This was, in effect, the basis of the original thread (the “mailbox” had no utility, and the homeowner was intentionally trying to hurt someone)
BASED ON THIS RULING (which only effects property in Ohio), you are not responsible if someone runs off the road and hits your reinforced mailbox. I think. If you SPECIFICALLY built things into your reinforced mailbox to injure someone hitting it, I would think you could still be liable. Heck, I don’t think this ruling stops the driver from filing a CIVIL suit; it just makes it harder to receive damages.
Nor does this address someone INTENTIONALLY hitting the item.
Yeah … no. Reinforcing a mailbox while it looks the same is NOT baiting someone who would hit a similarly-looking flimsy mailbox.
That’s a question of intent, which is legally a question of fact. If a trier of fact finds that you disguised your reinforcements in order to entice a mailbox batter to take a swing and the batter did so and injured himself, I predict you would get a different result than this case.
I’m going to pick out one specific word in the majority opinion:
ordinary
Not “legal” or “permissible” but “ordinary”. That adjective means usual, routine or expected. If it is expected that someone is going to hit your mailbox with a bat, it has happened many times already, and you have spent hundreds of dollars to protect yourself from these acts, it is ridiculous to then declare that a bat attack is unexpected, unusual or extraordinary.
Ordinary as in “affect the safety of ordinary travel on the road”.
Hanging out a window and hitting things with a bat is not ordinary travel.
people jump off bridges all the time and plummet to their death. It doesn’t mean there’s a defect in the design of the bridge.
I agree. This case doesn’t answer the debate in the other thread. This case was about if a homeowner has something off the road that might cause an injury to someone who unintentionally leaves the road in an accident. The Court cited existing Ohio case law that said that as long as your stuff off the road does not impede “ordinary” travel on the road, you aren’t liable. Having a black ice slide into a mailbox is not “ordinary travel.” Case dismissed.
The mailbox in this case was obvious to anyone coming by that it was a monster of a mailbox and there was testimony early in the case that the guy put this monster mailbox because kids were pulling the old one out of the ground. The monster mailbox could not deliberately hurt someone because it advertised what it was. The question in the other thread is about baiting or tricking someone who you have a reasonable likelihood to believe will intentionally hit your mailbox by disguising it and setting a trap. Completely different legal questions.
For this case to not apply, you would have to explain how mailbox baseball to cause vandalism is ordinary travel while sliding on black ice is not. Can you do it?
Because the debate in the other thread has nothing to do with negligence to cars traveling on the roadway. It is about the duty owed to trespassers and engaging in willful and reckless conduct.
The doctrine in this case doesn’t apply to all circumstances. I can’t murder the driver after he crashes into my lawn and get off of civil liability because he wasn’t using the roadway in the course of ordinary travel and cite this case. The law and circumstances are different.
The other case involved the right of a homeowner to construct property that resists damage from vandalism.
It was posted in the other thread that they charged a driver for engaging in the activity.
Tangentially related, here’s a case of a homeowner putting up a trap for drivers who exit the roadway and drive across his lawn, damaging it. In this case it was a board with nails on it to burst tires. Driving across someone’s lawn is not ordinary travel, but the homeowner was fined and told to remove the board because it was dangerous.
Similar to the theoretical ‘secretly reinforced mailbox’ this homeowner set up a situation so that the next person committing this act gets a nasty surprise. Very different than putting out a couple of white painted boulders on the edge of your lawn, and different than putting up an obviously sturdy mailbox to replace your broken one.
Videos of well built mailboxes have already been posted. In the videos it shows someone smashing a mailbox until the baseball bat splinters. No harm done to the person.
Mailboxes come in all manner of structural strength and the method of mounting them also varies greatly. A person has virtually no way of knowing how safe it is to hit something from a moving car.