Real people, as a rule, do not replace functional mailboxes with concrete dummies each night.
But real people do–in considerable numbers–build functional strong permanent mailbox structures, for the express purpose of foiling intentional and accidental damage (and continuing to receive mail).
Has anyone been held liable for a would-be vandal’s self-injury in such a real-world case? For damage to a careless driver’s vehicle?
Let’s try and reduce the distractions of postal regulations and functions, by considering garden gnomes instead of mailboxes.
Suppose I have a garden gnome close enough to the road that it keeps getting smashed, and I replace it with a very, very sturdy garden gnome.
There are no regulations regarding its composition, and it has no function other than to stand there.
Ascenray, are you going to say that I’m liable if some punk hurts himself trying to destroy my gnome?
Anybody can sue anyone for whatever reason, and if there’s a jury dumb enough to buy an idiotic argument that says a homeowner is liable for putting up a sturdy, functional mailbox because a dim-witted teen hurt himself trying to destroy it, the homeowner is SOL.
I live in Let’s-Destroy-The-Mailbox-Land, and a number of my neighbors with standard metal mailboxes have had them heavily damaged or destroyed. We have a sturdy plastic one which once, when hit with a bat, was knocked off its post but easily replaced atop it. It even withstood a blast from an M-80 placed inside.
<the graduate> “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” </tg>
Replacing the a flimsy mail box with a stronger functional one would not likely be an issue. It is when you are replacing it with a strong functional mailbox made to look like a flimsy mailbox that you are getting into a greyer area that could put you in more legal jeopardy.
Putting up a mailbox made with 1/4 inch reinforced steel ok.
Putting up a sheet metal mailbox and reinforcing the inside with concrete not ok.
In either case the prosecution has the potential to make the case you intended to cause harm to would be vandals and in both cases you have the potential to defend yourself claiming you had no intention of causing anyone harm and were simply trying to design a mailbox to withstand acts vandalism to mailboxes. In the first case you have a more convincing argument then the prosecution.
In all cases the act of vandalizing mailboxes is illegal. So if some dumb ass takes a bat to your mailbox that you’ve secretly reinforced for the purpose of causing the asshole injury. He’ll be charged with vandalism whether he’s injured or not. They won’t bother charging him if he’s dead. You’ll be charged if said asshole is injured or killed by your shenanigans.
This isn’t semantics, I’m addressing the actual physics of what caused the supposed injury.
It is by no means a foregone conclusion that hitting a concreate-filled mailbox is going to result in a particularly severe injury. I myself would have though, “He’ll probably stun himself and at worst, pull a muscle”. If the knowledge and intent are that only minor injuries are anticipated, then there ought to be a minimum level of injury present before we start looking beyond the reprehenisbly destructive and reckless behavior that led to the situation.
And someone playing mailbox baseball can very easily end up hitting a solid part of an ordinary mailbox stand and the car could still careen out of control for any number of reasons, thus underscoring how dangerous it inherantly is and pushing back at the idea of minimizing it as the mere destruction of mailboxes.
Now I’m maintaining that the level of injurious force that was brought to bear is an important variable is assigning blame to such level of injury as occured beyond the minimum required for sympathy. Extra injury to the arms of the “batter” is evidence that extra force was brought to bear. And since Mr. Mailbox is not supplying any of the force, the extra liability applies to those who did supply the extra force–the batter and in particular the driver, because of course the extra force came from the car, of course of course.
Are you talking about liability or culpability?
Is the garden gnome intentionally disguised to look like a more fragile garden gnome? Is the fragile gnome taken in every night and replaced with the tough gnome?
It doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. If you punch someone in the nose with the intent of giving him a bloody nose, but instead you end up sending a bone into his brain and killing him, you have still committed the intentional act that resulted in the harm. Bar brawlers get charged with homicide when all they intended was rough-and-tumble.
See, here’s the problem. The “reprehensibly destructive and reckless behavior” of destroying a mailbox simply is not parallel to causing bodily harm to a person.
Your intervening intentional act makes the difference situation. You intentionally increased the hazard with foreseeable harmful consequences. What might or might not have happened in some theoretical situation doesn’t save you. You don’t get to set deadly traps for people.
Pssttt…
I think some of you are crossing into that debate zone of what the law says vs what the law should be and confusing the two…
A related legal principle is the “Attractive Nuisance”. You can’t have a trampoline in your backyard without a lot of liability insurance because there’s no way you’re going to keep neighborhood kids from wanting to jump on it and inevitably hurting themselves.
I also recal hearing about a guy who got sued because a kid monkeying with his parked motocycle caused it to fall over on himself. A cool-looking machine like that is inevitably going to attract kids and expose them to its hazardous qualities. (And then there’s the old standby of people diving into empty swimming pools.)
So if the plaintiffs can argue that an ordinary-looking curbside mailbox falls into the same category as a trampoline and constitutes an attractive nuisance that is luring the rambunctious neighborhood to its hidden hazards, it would strengthen their case.
But the party being held responsible is the one who supplied the force level, so that makes sense.
A concrete mailbox is not a deadly trap. A reasonable person could readily forsee not-particularly harmful consequences to a kid hitting a sold object with a baseball bat. It’s possible to play mailbox baseball without hitting the thing so hard that you fuck your own shit up if you happen to hit a more solid object. If you really haul off on it then you went over and above the reasonable parameter.
OK, I’ll quit. This is fun, tho.
There is no “supply of force level” standard that I know of. Did you take the actions that resulted in the harm? Did you do it intentionally? Did you know it with knowledge of the reasonable foreseeable harm? Those are the relevant questions.
Sometimes it is, such as in the CSI episode. There’s no other purpose for the dummy mailbox except as a trap for the next vandal.
How could anyone resist that flimsy-looking mailbox, just asking to be swatted?
I haven’t seen any cites on what the law says.
All I know is that there are hundreds of thousands of real mailboxes standing beside American roads that could easily be implicated in injury to would-be vandals and careless drivers. So again, any real cases out there?
The kids left it alone because they thought it was the cooling tower for his really sweet gaming system.
Or mount a mailbox on a garage door spring, so it just bends over, and springs back, like a bobble-head mailbox.
That would make whacking it too much fun. You want the kids not to want to do it at all, not to make them want to back up and do it again.
I have to go with the ideas that won’t permanently injure, but will make them hurt enough not to ever try it again.
That’s why I like the break-away hinged idea. It’ll (I assume) ‘feel’ like it broke and they’ll just keep on going. The next day all you have to do is swing it back into place and reset the hook.
I’ve never known anyone to do this in my neighborhood, but I have a one piece plastic mailbox. I can’t imagine a baseball bat would do any damage at all to it. I think it would just bounce right off it and probably hurt the hitter almost as much as hitting something solid.
You are welcome to make that argument in your own defense. It isn’t going to be entirely convincing to every jury.
So you can go out of your way to design a mailbox that looks less solid then it actually is and risk higher liability on your part or you could not go out of your way and simply construct a solid mailbox that does not hide it’s solidness feature and have significantly lower liability.
OTOH, if you live in an area where this is common to the point that you’re putting up a new mailbox every few weeks you don’t want one that’s so solid that people see and think “challenge accepted…we’ll use the old pickup truck tonight.”
I just wanted to say all this is the fault of the movie Stand By Me. I think every mailbox owner who has suffered from this form of vandalism should get together and sue Rob Reiner for popularizing mailbox baseball.
At first I thought Stephen king but I don’t remember it happening in his story, Rob Reiner must have added it.
I guess. I think I’d just slap an ADT sticker on my mailbox.
