Then can we merge the thread I started about this into this one?
The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled in the case mentioned in this thread. In Snay v. Burr, they ruled that an owner of a reinforced mailbox owes no duty of care to someone who runs into the mailbox by accident. In this case, a motorist slid on black ice, and plowed into a reinforced mailbox.
From the opinion:
“The Burrs’ mailbox was located one foot, nine inches from the edge of the road, within the right-of-way. Burr installed the mailbox in 1996 after the Burrs’ previous mailbox had been broken, following repeated instances of suspected vandalism.
“He recalled that the guidelines recommended, but did not require, that a metal mailbox support be two-inch-diameter standard-steel or aluminum pipe and that the support be buried no more than 24 inches deep. For his mailbox support, however, Burr used an eight-inch-diameter metal pipe, which he
buried 36 inches deep. ‘
“Crawford’s report cited mailbox-support guidelines published by the United States Postal Service and by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials with which the Burrs’
mailbox support did not comply. He characterized the Burrs’ mailbox support as “a dangerous hazard to motorists” and “a proximate cause for the roll-over” that resulted in Snay’s injuries.”
“The Burrs’ mailbox did not affect the safety of ordinary travel on the regularly traveled portion of Young Road. And Burr’s knowledge that the mailbox’s construction was inconsistent with nonbinding postal-service guidelines does not warrant a departure from the general rule that the duty to motorists owed by an adjacent landowner or an occupier of land adjacent to the road extends only to conditions in the right-of-way that render ordinary travel on the regularly traveled portion of the road unsafe. This is true even though there existed the possibility that a vehicle might negligently veer off the regularly traveled portion of the road and hit the mailbox.” Bolding added.
It seems to me that swinging a baseball bat at a mailbox 1 ft. 9 inches away from the highway is not “ordinary travel on the regularly traveled portion of the road”, and thus the owners would not be responsible to said bat swinger.
There is, of course, a dissent. He states:
“It is quite clear that Burr did not build an ordinary mailbox: he consciously constructed a mini fortress to protect his mailbox. The Snays essentially argue that after doing so, Burr is not entitled to assert that the mailbox’s causing harm was unforeseeable and therefore he owes no duty to the public. I agree. The intentional construction of an immovable object in the right-of-way raises an issue of foreseeability. For this reason alone, summary judgment was improper. …
Finally, the public policy of this state that relates to foreseeability and whether a duty of care is owed ought not to condone the construction of virtually indestructible mailboxes in the right-of-way. I am concerned that some might read the majority opinion as sanctioning the construction of mailboxes that
are even stronger and more likely to cause harm than Burr’s, without regard to foreseeable consequences.”
Because it’s not a punishment, it’s a consequence. No one decided to break the kid’s arm.
Presumably the kid did.
It gets a bit blurred when the nature of the consequence is engineered. It’s ok for there to be nightmarish consequences to one’s own bad choices, assuming that someone didn’t act in the background to cause the terrible result.
At any rate, the most pro-vandal case being made is that liability could be attached if the homeowner deliberately disguised the reinforced mailbox in an effort to entice known vandals to strike and injure themselves.
I am a person whose mailbox has been repeatedly destroyed by vandals. Mine is an easy target, being along a blacktop road with no houses nearby. My own house is out of sight at the other end of a very long driveway. I have never seen damage consistent with “mailbox baseball” - striking the box from a moving vehicle. What I have seen is:
- crushing damage to the box from above with the post left intact
- post and box intact but pushed over perpendicular to the road, as though from a low-speed shove by a vehicle
- post pulled out of the ground, dragged to the opposite side of the road, and post and box both destroyed
- a collapsible mailbox I purchased that can be easily popped back into shape was instead shot full of holes
On two other occasions, the damage was due to accidental impact by oversized farm equipment and my sister-in-law accidentally striking it with her car.
Having no interest in doing harm to anyone who accidentally hits the mailbox, I have never put up a reinforced box. However, within the last year my postal carrier actually suggested I should use the ‘small box inside a larger concrete-filled box’ tactic. I wonder whether “the mailman told me to do it” would affect the legalities of injury resulting from mailbox baseball?