Nonsense. They both look like mailboxes. There’s no way to tell how well built they are which was my point. Your premise that one looks stronger than another is not just legal bullshit, it’s bullshit times 10 when viewed from a moving car. It’s also irrelevant.
More important, there’s zero way of telling how safe it is to hit ANY mailbox. It’s a ridiculously dangerous thing to do. This is on top of the court cases cited that says a homeowner is entitled to install a reinforced mailbox. There’s no caveat that a softer mailbox can’t be replaced by a stronger mailbox because its somehow evil to do so.
You wouldn’t do that to apples. It’s a clear threat to someone eating an apple which is not a dangerous act unto itself. But as we’re discussion mailboxes you can’t seem to understand the intent of installing a better mailbox is to resist damage. There is no encouragement to do it again and the mailbox does not pose a threat in normal activity. If you do try to destroy it (per the video I provided earlier), it doesn’t project itself in any way to the vandal.
there’s no legal premise that property be made safe for vandalism. there’s certainly no premise for making it safe for dangerous stunts.
Well, and you’re also not required to advertise that you’ve up-armored your mailbox. If you simply replace your perfectly functioning mailbox with another perfectly functioning mailbox that isn’t obviously different from the previous one to someone hanging out of a car traveling at 15MPH, I can’t see how you’d be at fault. It’s not a trap, it’s just a better mailbox that wasn’t as obvious as encasing your mailbox in brick.
Just about everyone on my parents’ cul-de-sac built theirs out of brick, and one was way overbuilt. It was pretty common throughout the neighborhood. Another neighbor a street over continuously rebuilt his brick mailbox because it was hit by cars (it’s a curve with a severely descending grade, people take it too fast and understeer into it).
At one house on the edge of the neighborhood, they just built two bollards out of steel pipe and concrete buried on either side and mounted the mailbox on a third. As far as I could tell, they did it because they were tired of people taking out their mailbox by driving over it (no curve here, so I suspect just drunks and jackasses). Before, we’d just notice that “yep, those mailboxes got mowed down again” on our bus ride to school. Afterward, I saw a couple of cars jacked up on the bollards on different random mornings. Last time I drove out of that neighborhood, those silver painted bastards were still there. I’m not saying the people who ran into those bollards didn’t have a legal case, but it wasn’t enough to get them removed if anyone thought to bring the case.
Will you at least admit that you are making this up as you go along? That you are giving your belief as to what the law should be instead of claiming what it is?
Because if we were sitting in a legislative conference room, your ideas would have some merit; make distinctions here v. there. But we are not in that room. We are in real life where the distinctions have been made in different places. And your distinction of apples v. mailboxes is not one of them. You concede that you are just making up this standard?
I could not find a cite in any of your posts. Would you be so kind as to at least give the post numbers for the post that links the court cases that prove your point?
Somebody else posted them. If I find them I’ll list the post#. They were related to the Ohio case of a man who struck a mailbox post when sliding on black ice.
I posted on that case myself, which does not seem germane to your line of reasoning. The intrusion on the property was accidental and the homeowner did nothing to lead drivers to believe it would be safe to slide on ice and hit his mailbox, and the homeowner did not intend to create a situation that would be dangerous to drivers who accidentally leave the roadway.
As has been stated before by those with legal credentials, intent is important. This is fundamentally different than a homeowner who expects someone to hit his mailbox with a bat and therefore modifies the mailbox with the intent of causing injury to such persons.
This thread has just gone in all different directions. Here’s the thing…You own a house, you put up a regular mailbox to receive mail. That’s what people do.
Some kid takes a swing at your mailbox and gets hurt far in excess of what a regular swing at a mailbox hurts a kid. The kid or his parents hire some swinging dick plaintiff’s lawyer. They file suit and send discovery on the homeowner. Why is your mailbox set to withstand a Cat 5 hurricane? If the homeowner can answer those questions to the satisfaction of a jury, then great.
But that jury will be instructed that if the homeowner set a trap for the kid to injure himself if he swung a bat at the mailbox, then the jury will find the homeowner liable and award money. Some posters disagree with this area of law, but it is well settled. You cannot do that. I think one single poster still wants to argue that this is not true, when it indisputably is.
Yeah, I thought about that difference after posting. I don’t know if the extra bollards really make too much of a difference, though. Because I’ve seen more than one mailbox mounted on one without the two extra bits of highly visible protection. That’s still going to pretty much stop most cars on top of it if they impact it head on. Really, it’s not that uncommon in rural areas of TX to see very overbuilt mailboxes and posts. There was a mailbox post that was running around my family that was a huge painted cast iron rattlesnake, it was gorgeously hideous (sadly, it’s no longer in the family, and I’ve never owned a house in an area with mailbox posts). A car that hit it might not be stopped, but you’d probably be able to locate it on foot easily afterward.
But yes, if nothing else, those bollards do give some insight into the mindset of the person installing the indestructible object. The visual signal indicates that “this is not a standard mailbox”, and they’d have more of an argument about their intent being to receive mail rather than punish vandals. I really think that the persons suing the theoretical mailbox owners generally will have a hard time proving the owner was setting a trap in all but the most extreme circumstances. Lots of areas do have limits on mailbox construction for reasons such as auto safety (I’ve seen mention of places where a 4"x4" wooden post is the limit), and if one went outside of those, I can imagine that that the mailbox owner may have a harder time arguing that their immovable object wasn’t a trap.
But really, if all you do is install a more durable object that still functions as the previous object, and conforms to the local laws; I can’t see them getting very far in arguing that your intent was to harm them. If you were smart, you’d add a sign saying “Indestructible mailbox!” in bright text that would be easy to read from a moving car, or some other indication that this is not a mailbox you should mess with lightly.
I am totally not a lawyer, and the example I’m thinking of is from a high school law class that was ohhhhhhh so many decades ago now, and I can’t even remember if it’s a hypothetical or not, but: The example that was given to us was that a pawn shop owner was having his shop broken into through a skylight repeatedly. He installed electrified fencing beneath it, and the next person who entered through that skylight was killed. I don’t even remember if it was a civil or criminal trial, so I’m pathetically short on details, but the shop owner was found culpable, at least. You can install electric fence in a lot of places, but as far as I know you usually have to mark it clearly when you do, and it has to be obviously the next thing you’re going to encounter. You can’t set it as a trap.
You seem to ignore he fuck stupid act of hitting something from a moving car.
If I were a defense attorney I’d ask for a demonstration of the safe way to do this. then I would ask how that differs between a hundred different mailboxes and how they adjusted their vandalism accordingly.
what it comes down to is homeowners aren’t expected to build and install property to accommodate irrational dangerous acts. That responsibility falls on the person committing the act. There is no safe way to do this.
Yeah, ISTM this is a key factor, if there is a regulation that the homeowner may not place within X feet of the traffic lanes an object of greater than a certain structural quality, then intentionally doing so may be counted against them (as what, that would depend on the specifics of what was done).
Beyond that limit, or in the absence of such regulation, that is where we get into the “reasonable person” territory and whether and how far does the the landowner have an inherent duty to minimize unforeseen harm. (I mean, if an out of control car departs the road altogether and has gone 50 or 100 feet past the ROW into my property and then hits a 10-ton granite-and-concrete architectural piece, I should hope that is within the realm of “unforeseen accident”).
Come to think of it, there is the element that the solid bollards can be also seen as a barrier to prevent an errant vehicle from continuing on to put more lives and property at risk, and in a wreck, the actual mailbox may be knocked off its support or dented but it is the easiest-to-replace component of the assemblage.
(There are such things as Heavy Duty “indestructible” mailboxes that are perfectly legal but they are really more along the lines of “won’t be destroyed by a casual hit though it may get dents and paint scratches” (video about how one model stand s against bat-wielding attacker on foot halfway down the page), not “you need a .50 cal at close range to take this thing out”. )
You keep asking this and when you get an answer, you refuse to accept it. But here it is again:
There is no safe way to hit a mailbox from a moving car. Nobody in this thread says that there is a safe way to hit a mailbox from a moving car. Nobody.
What people are saying, and what you continue to ignore is that if I am 16 years old and see a black mailbox on a 4X4 post, and I take a swing at it, there is an expected value for what sort of push back I get from swinging at it.
If the homeowner set a deliberate trap so that if I swing at it, I get a concrete filled box, then the homeowner is liable for the additional injury I might receive, above and beyond that I might get from swinging at a regular mailbox.
This is an undisputed principle of law that everyone acknowledges except you. You want to disagree with 800 years of English common law with no cites or no anything except repetition.
To follow up, everyone admits that the kid hitting the mailbox is committing a dangerous criminal act. If you catch the kid, he can be prosecuted and he will be liable, and depending on your state, his parents may be liable for the damage to the mailbox. Are we good there? Nobody disputes that the kid is a little asshole and you have every right to get money from him and you can build a giant marble mailbox so that the kid can’t knock it down. Again, we are in agreement.
The only thing you can’t do, the only thing, is that you can’t put up a strong mailbox that looks flimsy with the intent of baiting the kid into taking a swing at it so he hurts himself more so than he would by taking a swing at the flimsy looking mailbox. That’s all. And it is such a well settled principle of law that nobody should be arguing otherwise.
And you refuse to accept that no one is supporting someone who deliberately fills a mailbox with concrete to make it unusable and intending it will hurt someone. What we do support is that a homeowner has the right to reinforce their property to protect it from vandalism (and that doesn’t make it a trap in this case) and that if some punk chooses to engage in dangerous behavior and gets injured from those illegal acts that try to destroy others’ property then fuck 'em.
The only thing you can’t do, the only thing, is that you can’t put up a strong mailbox that looks flimsy with the intent of baiting the kid into taking a swing at it so he hurts himself more so than he would by taking a swing at the flimsy looking mailbox.
Reinforcing a mailbox is not baiting someone. If someone keeps kicking my front door in when I’m at work so I buy a door with a steel core and reinforced deadbolt, are you claiming I baited the kid when he proceeds to break his foot the next time he kicks it. Are you saying morally and legally I’m in the wrong in that situation?
That’s why we have courts and juries. If a kid is playing mailbox baseball and he gets an injury that seems not quite right for the situation and the homeowner has a solidified mailbox, then some lawyer will probably file suit.
And whether it settles before trial or a jury decides, the settlement amount or the jury verdict will be based on the instruction from the judge that if the homeowner acted recklessly by setting a trap, he is liable. You can argue that you just reinforced your door like a responsible property owner. The other guy can say you set a trap. In our system, you get twelve of your fellow citizens to decide what you did.
A quick search says that Utah retains the common law duty, and a little searching elsewhere fails to find a state that holds that a landowner owes no duty to a trespasser.
Many states have the rule that you are referring to, that if you are engaged in an illegal act, you cannot recover damages. One that we learned in law school out of Virginia was a pretty silly case where a man knowingly gave a woman a venereal disease but she could not recover because she was engaged in the crime of fornication. (This was 1990). That has been deemed a pretty silly case and not followed elsewhere but the illegal acts exclusion does not overcome the duty not to act in a willful, wanton and reckless way, even towards a trespasser.
Yeah, it was Zysk v. Zysk 404 S.E.2d 721 (Va. 1990). Overruled in 2005 after the VA Supreme Court held that the fornication law didn’t survive Lawrence v. Texas.
But, the point remains, the duty owed to trespassers overcomes the illegal act exclusion for recovery of damages, even if one is illegally trespassing.