It doesn’t have to be the driver opening the package in the car The distraction happening in the seat next to the driver could be just as bad. New in this iteration of the glitter bomb is an attempt to automatically force the box cover to pop off.
Yeah, that’s a good point - also, the thief could have an accomplice, who opens the box in the passenger seat.
I said I don’t know how it would affect legal liability. I was thinking of these posts:
which seemed to me to presume that only the thief would be hurt, and therefore that it ought to be fine to supply the thief with packages that might cause a crash.
I don’t see how you’re getting that from any of those posts. It absolutely doesn’t apply to the middle one, I assure you.
Yes, IIRC correctly at least some such videos that I’ve seen have involved a passenger opening the box.
If the driver is paying proper attention to the road, but the box the passenger opens startles the driver with a loud alarm and/or glitter bomb and/or stinkbomb etc. and there’s an accident, ISTM there is a lot less reason to consider the driver directly responsible for the accident. Even if the driver is at fault for stealing the box in the first place.
My opinion (and IAAL) is that Rober is in the clear.
Why? The ex turpi rule as we often call it briefly, or to be more explicit, the ex turpi causa non oritur actio rule: “from a dishonorable cause an action does not arise.”
Let’s apply that rule to Rober’s scenarios. A package is left on somebody’s porch. It is meant for the people who live in the house; it belongs to them. An uninvited porch pirate then trespasses upon the property, then steals the package that does not belong to him or her–this is the dishonorable cause, and the ex turpi rule comes into play.
Because of that rule, what happens after that is not Rober’s responsibility. Remember, the package is stolen, and stealing somebody else’s package is illegal (i.e. a “dishonorable cause”). So, if the thief opens it in the car while driving, nobody can hold Rober liable for what happens next–it was the thief’s decision to steal the package and then to open it while driving; and if the thief (or anybody who was damaged by the car crashing) suffered damages, the ex turpi rule means that Rober is not liable. It is all on the thief to pay whatever damages.
I would consider it would be quite foreseeable that a passenger in the car would open the package while the vehicle was in motion and the explosion could distract the driver enough to cause an accident, so yes I think there would be some liability there
IANAL but it appears that other actual lawyers do not consider ex turpi to be a universally applicable get-out-of-liability-free card in cases of injury to malefactors.
Here, for example:
There seems to be no doubt that these glittersplosion porch packages are intended as booby traps to cause at least annoyance, if not necessarily harm, to thieves. Since IANAL I don’t know how liable the boobytrapper might be if the trick package glittersplosion produced actual harm to the thief, e.g., by causing a car accident when opened by an unsuspecting passenger.
But just saying that ex turpi automatically shields you from liability, no matter what, sounds questionable.
Here’s another lawyer’s musings on the subject:
AIUI Rober’s lawyers have advised him that he can’t sell the glitter bomb booby traps, so that also suggests possible concerns about potential liability.
IANAL, but it seems to me to be a lot of daylight between rigging a shotgun to fire at someone opening a door they shouldn’t be opening and creating a package that would only cause lethal harm if opened in a moving car after being stolen.
I hope we can agree on these:
- If the package contained a bomb rigged to explode when it was stolen off the porch, that would be illegal and Rober would be liable for any harms
- If the package contained nothing but an empty box, Rober would not be liable for any harms, because no reasonable person expects an empty box to cause harm.
Therefore, his package falls somewhere in between. The answer is going to depend on the specifics of any relevant state laws. It likely would come down to whether a reasonable person would foresee a harm.
The real question is whether he would be liable if the package contained a mailbox.
What if the box is filled with dogshit and not some physically startling device? What about just food scraps?
What if the box contained a Raggedy Anne doll, and the thief gets distracted because he was confused/pissed that the box didn’t contain something really valuable, and he has an accident?
Attractive nuisance? Maybe if a little kid takes it, but an adult? Fuck him, any and all results should be on the thief.
I think that in your scenario, he’d probably be in the clear. But back in the real world, he’s loaded the boxes with a car horn, a glitter bomb, fart spray, and a loud countdown. Everything that he puts in the box is designed to grab your attention.
Like I said, I hope that he’s OK because I hate thieves. But he’s working in and around San Francisco. They’re not exactly known for the conservative views.
I suspect a lot of San Francisco residents are tired of the petty crimes like car break ins and porch pirates. You don’t have to be conservative to be sick of that baloney.
Even more directly: the thief who opens the stolen box while driving is actively committing the crime of transporting stolen goods or fleeing the scene of a crime. A citizen calling attention to a crime isn’t liable for distracting the criminal committing the crime.
I think the main liability is spraying a noxious chemical might be assault.
And what happens when it’s some stupid 8 year old kids screwing around in the neighborhood who get cut in half by that shotgun while you aren’t around? Or somebody running for their lives from a dog? Or an assailant? Or just a plain jane thief - you get to be judge, jury, and executioner for somebody who’d only get jail time if they got caught by the police?
How crazy is the case law then?
He’s admitted to using staged footage before so maybe there aren’t any actual thieves.
Sure, I get that argument. How about a booby-trap in a bank vault? No kids, no dogs, nobody running.
And note that since you could have been (in some jurisdictions) sitting there with the shotgun and shot the guy, there are cases where it doesn’t seem substantively different. But you’d still legally be toast in the booby-trap case.
That’s not really fair. People who knew what the package was took it and faked being surprised by it. But Rober did not arrange for this to happen and did not know about it until after he uploaded the video. When the fakery was discovered he re-edited and re-uploaded his video to remove the fake parts.
Unless there is some reason to doubt Rober’s account, he was a victim of fakery, not a perpetrator.
Well, it did say FLAMMABLE but it wasn’t underlined.