Moderator Note
Again, feel free to discuss this, just not here.
One can imagine a situation where a homeowner installed such a mailbox, but with the expectation that it would result in merely a broken bat, not injury to the batter.
Sorry if I missed it upthread.
There was extensive discussion of this incident upthread, beginning with post #90.
Sorry, I did a quick search for “Snay,” the person injured, and got no matches.
He was named in a lot of the links but not in any of the actual posts. In my posts he was “plaintiff.”
It is worth remarking that in the Martin case
That is, his intentions made a big difference in of what crime exactly he was considered guilty.
Sidebar: Where does a jury verdict not have to be unanimous?
It was the Crown Court at Norwich, and
That page is for “UK Public General Acts”; I do not know the precise applicability of jurisdiction— but if you kill someone in England it seems you may find yourself on trial there.
Well, ya ninja’d me on that. But it is interesting to note that until recently, you only needed 10 to convict in Louisiana.
EDIT: It was more or a ninja a bit over half hour ago when I started typing this, but just got back to it after being busy for a bit.
I read about 20 posts or so into the thread before asking this:
Why not build one of those mailboxes that has a brick-covered exterior? And is pretty obviously so? Surely there can be no liability there.
The legal issues come when you deliberately build a mailbox as a trap, whose purpose is to hurt someone.
It is usually OK to just build a sturdy mailbox whose purpose is to get mail. Some areas do have special rules, however.
I’ve heard of people vandalizing mailboxes. I had no idea is was so common that people were modifying their mailboxes as a result. I would have guessed it was a exceedingly rare. I guess I was wrong. It’s never happened to me, and I’ve never see it in any area I lived in.
I think it is rare - which is why when it happens (and particularly when someone dies/gets injured attempting it) it makes the news. Its somewhat analogous to child abductions (obvious difference in importance here) - there really aren’t that many of them, but with the nationalization of the news cycle you hear about all of them and begin to think that kids are getting grabbed off the street everywhere.
I think that it’s fairly rare to find people who do this sort of thing for fun (especially since in the classic form, it takes multiple such people, one driver and one batter), but once you have someone who’d do it once, they’ll probably do it again. So only a few people (those who live near the troublemakers) will get their mailbox vandalized, but those few people would see them vandalized repeatedly.
When I was a kid it was pretty common. Mailbox smashing would happen mostly in late summer and fall, which not coincidentally was when 16-18 year olds were given the family car to spot deer in preparation for deer season.
Kids would say they were spotting deer, when in reality we err they were drinking beer. I never smashed mailboxes, but my cohorts did.
I remember a single spate of mailbox smashings where I grew up, but it was not common to my knowledge. I believe we had a mailbox with a noticeable dent in it for quite a while.
Agreed. You can plant oak trees or build the giant dragon mailbox posted earlier. You can put a razor wire fence around your yard.
What you cannot do is have a bamboo pit in your yard, covered with grass or a gun which discharges when a door is opened and then claim that “the sonofabitch shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
The law gives landowners leeway from lawsuits against trespassers, except that you cannot deliberately try to harm them if they trespass.
I think we have plenty of experience that this is not a valid defense. Much like felony murder, when you do something you’re responsible for even unexpected consequences.