Unless the mailbox actively attacked someone your premise doesn’t hold up. It’s an inanimate object.
By your logic anything designed to resist damage is an intent to harm.
I think you are being too literal. It is the installation of a trap. A device that looks like an ordinary device, but is reinforced with the intent to injure. For example, it looks like a mailbox on a post. But it is filled with concrete. It looks like a patch of grass, but there is a bamboo pit concealed underneath.
You don’t escape liability on those last two things simply by saying that nobody should be hitting a mailbox with a baseball bat or trespassing on your front lawn anyways.
Not really. That isn’t the logic, and is misrepresenting the nuances of the logic involved. Simply designed to resit damage does not include intent to injure.
You can construct all manner of readings of the logic by selectively ignoring parts of the chain. That is little more than a straw man argument. You can find people willing to engage in that sort of reasoning in any bar.
Resistance to damage is an incidental attribute of the trap. The intent is that the design of the trap is to cause injury. Now you can argue forever what the intent was. Get to court and you hire lawyers to do that for you. And the other side has lawyers that will argue the opposite. Eventually a reasonableness argument will hold sway. Was the design reasonable for the use case or would a reasonable person conclude that the design was modified past a reasonable level of resistance to damage with the intent that it would cause injury to an errant teenager? There is also the reckless endangerment question. Would a reasonable person be expected to appreciate that the design would be likely to cause injury? If they went ahead with the construction with the knowledge that there was a good chance an injury would result, even if it wasn’t deliberately set as a trap, there are going to be legal ramifications. Like I keep saying, eventually the mailbox owner will be judged on how much of dick they have been. Trying to argue your way out of dick behaviour by coming up with straw man arguments typically just ends up digging you in deeper.
Obviously all manner of arguments can be made. Just how over-designed and overbuilt was the mailbox? Was the design a reasonable one within the scope of the chosen materials? Plenty of brick mailboxes where I live, but they are obviously brick.
I’ve seen heavy-duty mailboxes like this that need cement to keep them standing:
There’s only one argument to make. does a person have the right to build property that resists damage. if a person injures themself trying to damage that property then the injury is the result of their actions and not the reinforcement.
You can apply the logic to anything and test it. Example. A person is hit in the head with an 8 lb sledge hammer after it bounces off a steel door. It’s the action of the person and not the door that caused the injury.
There is no expectation that property be constructed so that it can be damaged.
You may assert this is so. The law and legal precedence has a different opinion. If push came to shove, I know which side my money would be on as to the outcome. It would not be on your interpretation of the argument.
The one argument to make is this:
Nobody has the right to intentionally or recklessly endanger another person.
The law has a clear precedence over these rights. Your right to construct something how you wish comes a very long way down the list of rights relative to this one. In court you may find your view is not one shared with the person that is actually deciding your fate. If someone is injured you can argue until you are blue in the face about the precedence, but any idea that there is one inviolate rule that come above all overs allowing you to be a dick is just plain naive. You will lose. In a civil suit you may just lose your house. In a criminal case you are in a world of hurt. That is simply the reality. No amount of arguing how the rules should be will help.
You may look to car safety legislation as a clear enacted set of regulations enforcing the principle (as enforcement was needed as car manufacturers were quite happy to be dicks unless forced not to. Many lost lawsuits.) You may not construct a car in a manner that endangers the occupants of another car in a crash or a pedestrian if hit by the car. Modern cars don’t just protect the occupants, they avoid overly strong construction so that pedestrians are not pulverised and shredded, and other cars, if hit, don’t find themselves with rigid parts of your car intruding into their passenger area. There is no right to construct something simply as strong as you see fit if there is a reasonable chance that such action will endanger someone else.
There is no intent or reckless disregard for injury, so the example isn’t valid. I really don’t get how every single straw man argument we see here wilfully ignores the intent or recklessness component. Intent is key. If you don’t use that in your examples, they fail at the first step.
I made a fairly clear example between a fortified mailbox and a fortified door. There is no intent in either to cause injury.
The OP provided a scenario where there was intent to injure. That is where the discussion stems from. If you construct a nice strong mailbox with no intent that a teenager hitting with a baseball bat will be injured, well, there is no intent. There remains reckless endangerment. If you still understand that a construction might cause injury, say by constructing it on the edge of your property next to the road, but basically don’t care that a car hitting it would sustain significant life threatening damage, you may be guilty of reckless endangerment. You don’t get to be a dick.
Again, the point I am making: There is an expectation that you will not wilfully or recklessly endanger others. Your right to build property that resists damage is subservient to this.
The OP posits a mailbox filled with concrete. That is no longer functional as a mailbox and serves only as bait to cause injury to someone who attempts to damage it. That is quite different than having a bona fide mailbox that is designed to resist damage, and visibly so (like the brick-column mailbox shown earlier in this thread).
What legal premise states something that looks like a mailbox has to be functional?
There isn’t one.
There is a legal premise is that you may not create a mantrap. A mailbox made of solid concrete as described in the OP is a mantrap. Setting a mantrap is a criminal offence. Someone dying as a result of your setting of a mantrap will end up with you doing a significant stretch of hard labour.
I’m not getting why this is difficult to grasp. It has nothing to do with the actual implementation of the mantrap. There is no difference in the eyes of the law between a mailbox filled with concrete designed to injure a belligerent teenager and a pit filled with spikes covered with grass, or a shotgun wired to a door.
What legal premise says that your lawn has to be safe to walk on, or your empty house wont kill kids that are bored and want to explore? The answer is a premise that says you may not intentionally or recklessly endanger others. Again, why is this hard to grasp?
Nothing per se. But if you build this with the full expectation that someone is going to try to damage it and in the process become injured, that is where you get into legal trouble.
The legal principle is the duty of care under tort law. In most states, you owe a duty to trespassers not to act in a willful, wanton, or reckless manner. Typically for invited guests or business guests you owe a duty of due care.
So if a trespasser stumbles over a hose you left in your yard, you likely are not liable because that would be mere negligence.
What is described by the op is a passive, inert object. It does not explode or in any way injure a person through it’s existence.
In order for it to injure someone they have to hang out the window of a car and hit it.
Can you establish the procedures for doing this safely? Because, and I think this is important, it’s a risky and dangerous thing to do regardless of what is being struck.
If you can get beyond this legal point then how does the court establish the liability of the home owner for dangerous acts committed by someone else.
Is a chef’s knife you happen to have on you a useful tool, or an illegal offensive weapon? In such cases it is not the properties of the object that determine whether or not you are a criminal. Your solid depleted-uranium abstract sculpture may be OK while the mailbox-looking concrete may not be, even though you would not want to ram into either with a speeding car.
None of this matters for a criminal case. In a civil case, if the parents of the now dead teenager sue you, the court may well apportion blame, enough that you don’t lose the case. But in a criminal trial there is no such argument, you set a mantrap, someone was injured or worse. Case closed, you lost, get your affairs in order, you won’t be seeing the outside world for a very long time.
Now the OP’s scenario is nuanced, it was a TV show’s plot, so of course it was. The plot hinged on intent. Not only was the mailbox concrete, but it was substituted for the real one each evening. All very contrived, but making an unfolding story of how the intent was established. The mailbox was constructed with the knowledge that it would be so struck, and with the intent that injury would result.
If you know that there are a bunch of kids engaged in a risky behaviour in your neighbourhood, you do not get to make that behaviour even more risky. You most certainly do not get to make that behaviour potentially fatal.
Say there are some local kids that steal apples off a tree in your front yard. What are reasonable steps you may take to prevent them from doing so? You sure as heck do not get the fill some of the fruit with needles, even if the fruit is on your property and the kids are both trespassing and stealing. How about applying a human toxic insecticide? That comes in as reckless endangerment at best, and if you had a reasonable expectation that someone would steal and eat the apple, wilful intent.
The mailbox was constructed so that it would not crush. It was not constructed to actively hurt someone in the form of a booby trap. You can buy such a mailbox today which consists of a much heavier gauge steel.
You haven’t established a requirement that an inert privately owned object be constructed to reduce harm to someone attempting to damage it.
Swinging a bat at something while hanging out of a moving car is the action that risks injury. Not the object.
Well, when you fill the mailbox with concrete so that is can’t be used as a mailbox, and you admit to the cops you did it to get even with that kids, then you are in real trouble.
And I believe that was the only successful criminal prosecution.
I do not know of anyone successfully sued for just a overbuilt mail box.
Has anyone found such a suit?
In order to get killed by the shotgun trap you have to enter the house illegally. But even so, the homeowner can & will be arrested and convicted. Intent.
You have seen the TV show then? I haven’t so I am just going on what was written about the show. What has been said above about the mailbox was that is was solid concrete. You know better then and it was just a standard off the shelf mailbox?