Indeed. In a criminal case, the homeowner can remain silent. But you have the kid’s testimony. You have the police pictures of the mailbox. You have the separated wife or the neighbor’s testimony that he saw the homeowner putting 30 lbs of concrete in the hole, etc. etc. In a civil case, he must testify.
Again, and again, no. Everyone admits that it is not safe to swing a bat at a mailbox. But an expert will testify that if you swing at an X strength mailbox, a 16 year old kid might expect a certain injury. But if he swings at a Y strength mailbox, he might expect this increased injury. The injury from the Y-X will be what the judge instructs the jury that the homeowner is responsible for IF you find that he installed the mailbox in a willful, wanton, and reckless manner intending to injure the kid. Hornbook law.
But he does. He has a legal duty to, yes trespassers, not to act in a willful, wanton, and reckless manner. He cannot set a trap. That is the duty that you, I, that poster, the guy next door, and everyone owes to trespassers. It is a very small duty. Not at all the duty we owe to the girl scouts selling cookies. But we do owe them the duty not to set traps.
And that’s fine if expert is the defendant but there’s no way to prove the average person is an expert on mailbox baseball. And frankly an “expert” would be made a fool of by even the worst defense lawyer for all the reasons I gave above.
There’s nothing illegal about installing a mailbox that resists damage. You’ve said that yourself. You’ve killed your own case. The homeowner used common sense to install a stronger mailbox.
the legal duty to trespassers doesn’t extend to dangerously stupid stunts. Otherwise people would driver junk cars into trees and claim whiplash hoping to get a new car. It’s not up to the homeowner to maintain a tree so that it’s safe to ram head-on.
@UltraVires I think you can see by now that you are arguing against a Johnny one-note position. Magiver has not presented any cites, case law, or any kind of legal reasoning supporting his position. All the business about whether the mailbox is “active,” what constitutes evidence, and whether the homeowner committed a criminal act is all diversionary tactics. The entire position is based on, “It is dangerous to hit someone’s mailbox with a baseball bat, therefore the mailbox owner can build a mailbox which makes it even more dangerous and face no penalty if there is injury.” As you have seen this argument is simply repeated over and over again without regard to how the courts actually treat tort law (IANAL).
I was in here at first to have a rational discussion of the issue, then kind of recreationally to see how far this particular argument would go, and now I’m getting bored and have no more spare time to spend on this one point. I wish you luck.
Well, he’s a long time poster and I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt that maybe he is just misunderstood about the law.
His position is not irrational, and I am not unsympathetic to it. Yes, the kid shouldn’t be swinging at my mailbox anyways, and if he finds out that I put in an extra strong one, then fuck him, that will teach him for next time. I get the argument, and as I said, I’ve heard worse ones.
But that isn’t the current law in any common law jurisdiction I know. If you set a trap, it is well settled that you will pay for doing that and may very well go to jail. This is not to say that I agree or disagree with the state of the law, but it IS what the law IS.
To follow up, @Magiver makes a good point that in a criminal case, you have a Fifth Amendment right. Maybe in a specific case, there isn’t enough evidence to show that you (the general you) set a trap and the jury gets it wrong. It happens all of the time. Nobody ever said our system was perfect.
But they will be instructed properly. Maybe you (the general you) tried to break that kid’s arm and the jury found otherwise. Maybe you didn’t have that intention and the jury improperly found against you (the general you). The system is imperfect. But that IS what the law IS.
“I had already replaced the darn thing four times, so instead of replacing it another 10, I just bought a stronger one.”
Now - you (plaintiffs attorney) can spin that as “intent to cause harm” (and that may actually be part of the reason I did it (but I’ll never say that on the stand)), but if you ask me that I’ll say that I’m sorry someone got hurt, but I have a right to install a mailbox that will survive vandalism.
Note (and I think we’re all agreed on this), that argument wouldn’t fly for the concrete-filled dummy box.
The jury gets to see his demeanor, and judges him. Right? We get a jury of our peers…other people in the venue who know the area and decide if it was reasonable for him to put up that mailbox. They listen to him, the kid, the neighbor, the police, and take all of the evidence and make a decision.
They might get it wrong, but that is the system we have. If you have a better one, then I’m all ears, because I think that they do get it wrong more than they should.
And to once again follow up on that thought, the founders were all about jury trials because in England the King would appoint his lackeys as judges and they did whatever he said. It was a big deal for those guys to say, no, if I’m going to prison or someone is taking my money, it’s not the King’s lackeys, it is 12 guys, property owners (yes, flame me if you must) who are living in this area, who are regular people just like me who will judge me.
Well, that doesn’t really happen anymore. Again, flame me, but the regular juror is fucking stupid. He or she hates being there and will just go along with whatever to get home. Send the guy to prison for forever? Fine with me, I have a volleyball game to get to. Nobody takes it seriously. It is completely backwards from the reason we wanted juries in the first place.
Agree - I was just responding to your hypothetical on spending 8x normal on a mailbox - seems a fairly easy rebuttal is all.
You’ve seen a lot more juries then I have, but the two I was on (a Federal civil case, a state 2nd degree murder), everyone took things pretty seriously.
The civil one took quite a bit of discussion. Found for the plaintiff against the police department (not a brutality case), main area of discussion was who to assign damages to (not the patrol officers, yes to the captain and chief who should have aware of the actual law).
The murder one, not so much discussion. And most of that was why it was a three-day trial, two of which were the prosecutor laying out that the defendant wasn’t a particularly nice person (which the defense (public defender we later found out) did a nice job of fending off and that the victim was a nice person (whose mother loved her and missed her). Lots of reasonable doubt right up until the last witness who said “I know the guy personally, I saw shoot the gun which was aimed at the apartment where the victim was”. Could have saved a lot of time by bringing him up first.
And they were all about false accusations too. You can’t just say someone deliberately tried to harm someone unless you have evidence to the claim. That’s libel. Your $150 mailbox purchased by a poor person opinion piece is not evidence. it wouldn’t fly in court. The likely outcome would be an invitation by the judge to both attorneys in sidebar before the trial starts and it gets dismissed for lack of evidence.
As has been said a million times, you can put up the strongest mailbox you want. Think Mt. Rushmore, think Stone Mountain, GA. The hardest mailbox ever. You can install that to receive your mail.
But what you cannot do is install a strong mailbox and make it deliberately look like a weak mailbox so a kid takes a swing at it and gets doubly hurt for doing so. That’s it. I should repeat that last sentence because posters keep saying some equivalent of “But can’t I put up a strong mailbox?” Yes, but it should look like a strong mailbox, not look like a weak mailbox to bait a kid into taking a swing at it.
Did you design it that way so a kid might hurt himself trying to break it down? If I am a jury member, it sounds like you did. Are those normal doors? Do people in your neighborhood typically have doors like that? I don’t know of anyone who has a door like that, but maybe someone could give testimony that would show me that such a door is perfectly normal. Maybe someone else says it isn’t and it is a trap to hurt a kid or a trespasser. I hear the evidence and make a decision.
If you put up a regular front door, then you are on the good side and should/will win if you are sued. If you set a trap, you should/will lose.
No I did it so my door wouldn’t be smashed in (costing me money) every day. The wood veneer is for aesthetics.
And I am really curious what your legal definition of a trap is. The law (Ceballos) seems to think a trap is indiscriminant in that it can injure the innocent and guilty alike along with first responders. How does a reinforced mailbox injure the innocent/first responders? Katko supports that an illegal trap could hurt a child or innocent trespasser. How does a reinforced mailbox do that?