There’s a news story going around about a man being arrested for theft for plugging his electric car into a publicly accessible outlet.
I would like to know, from a strict legal perspective, what laws govern access to publicly accessible goods like this? Let’s say you have a water fountain outdoors. Would it be legal for me to take a drink from it? (I would hope so!) What if I were to fill a water bottle? What if it were to attach a hose to it and use it to fill up my water cistern next door?
What about if I came into the public restrooms and used the soap dispenser to fill up a bottle of soap for myself. Or if I go to a BBQ restaurant which provides sauce at the table and I poured sauce into a bottle to take home?
Again, I’m not interested in the morality of such actions, just the strict legal definitions.
I certainly plug my iPhone in at outlets in the airports, and I have plugged my Volt into outlets in parking lots when I can find them. I suppose it would be illegal if there was a sign stating “for employees’ use only” or some such thing. Here’s the Washington state definition of “theft.”
It seems absurd, but only because the amount of electricity used is tiny, and the reasonable response would be to just tell the guy to unplug the car and charge it at home.
The fact that the outlet is on the exterior of the building does not mean it is public property. It’s the school’s electrical outlet, and they can use it as they see fit. I’m sure you wouldn’t be pleased if your neighbor dragged an extension cord over to your front porch so he could plug in his Christmas lights, and really this is no different.
Wrongfully obtain unauthorized control over services.
That’s what I read as being equivalent to plugging in your car to an exterior outlet, without the authorization of the building manager/representative.
WRT a water fountain, if you are authorized to be on the premises, I would consider it a matter of “good faith” that water fountains are intended to provide personal drinking water to people authorized to be in the area.
The first two probably fine, the latter I doubt it.
Based on the history of public water fountains, you have a reasonable assumption that the fountain was in fact placed there for your personal drinking use. Because water fountains are indeed generally installed for the purpose of providing a drink to passers-by. Filling up a cistern is not a thing you can reasonably expect to do without asking.
Electric outlets don’t have that kind of assumption, mostly because it’s only recently that people regularly bring electrical things with them that they might want to plug in. An external electric outlet was probably installed to make various external work by the property owner or his agents more convenient. Not to provide electricity to the public.
Based on Procrustus’s cite, it seems that 2b is a valid defense. The car owner made a good-faith assumption that an electrical outlet near a parking lot was available for the use of charginc electric cars.
He was authorized to be on the premises. People certainly do use outlets when they are on school premises without a second thought, and most of them aren’t specifically put there for use of visitors. So it could be argued that there is already an existing expectation that outlets are available for use. I’d say (2) (a) in Procrustus’s post would apply.
My neighbor isn’t authorized to come onto my property to use my outlet to power his lights, so that comparison doesn’t apply here. ETA: On the other hand, a more apt comparison would be if I had a visitor with an electric car, and unbeknownst to me, he plugged into my exterior outlet. Could I really have him arrested?
Your visitor is stealing electricity. Whether the local plod would do anything about it is a different matter. They may well decide that simply requesting her to stop, would be enough.
On an interesting note, how would restitution for theft of electricity work? Would the restitution order be denominated in money or would it be denominated with respect to the actual amount of energy you used in Joules or kilowatt-hours? Either way, how would the judge know exactly how much you used? It’s not like electric bills tell you that your toaster used X kWh, your computer used Y kWh, and your big “Cecil Rox” neon sign used Z kWh - they just say that you used A kWh and each kWh costs B dollars. If restitution can or must be made in energy itself, can you choose whether to give the victim a crate of AA batteries or tell them to stop by your house between 2 and 5 on Saturday afternoon to use your outlet?
I don’t think so. Look at what the guy says; he defends his actions not by saying that he honestly believed he was entitled to take the electricity (“a claim of title made in good faith”); he just says that the value of what he took (or of what he was able to take before he was interrrupted) is too small to bother with.
But that’s no more a defence of “good faith claim of title” than “hey, it’s just a candy bar” is a defence to a charge of shoplifting.
I expect that this is a general defense against a charge of theft, though. It’s not stealing to take something that you had a good faith belief was being offered freely to you.
Businesses will begin installing them specifically for the use of their customers, because that will attract customers to the business. Just like every coffee shop now provides outlets at nearly every table. When our public libraries here are remodeled, they add outlets near each table, for the free use of patrons. Airports & similar waiting areas often offer free electrical outlets. Heck, I noticed a recent change in the dentists’ waiting room to add waist-high outlets on each wall.
Here in Minnesota, we’re aheqd of the curve on this – many parking spots already have electrical outlets available – they were installed for engine tank heaters in winter.
There would be an assumption that a water fountain or a drinking fountain placed outdoors, in a public area, or an area accessable to the public, would be available for the public to use.
Just because a building has an electrical outlet on the outside of the building does not mean it’s available for general public use. Airports/airlines made a choice to allow customers to use their electrical outlets as a convience and as an inducement to fly their airline. Other businesses also have made the choice to allow their customers to use their electricity.
The Leaf owner would be arrested if he stole his next door neighbors electricity or tapped into his neighbors water supply.
Kamooneh would get much better mileage for any gasoline-powered vehicles he owned if he carried a hose and stole gasoline from the Chamblee Middle School vehicles.
Kamooneh’s excuse seems to be that he didn’t steal very much electricity. (This time.)
Well, yes, but suppling free electrical power to electric cars is the equivalent of supplying free petrol to conventional cars, and very few business do that.
I appreciate that the fuel cost per km differs for petrol and electric cars and I confess I haven’t looked into how much power an employer or a shopping centre might actually find itself supplying, were employee/customer parking bays fitted with power outlets, and employees/customers routinely hooking up every time they parked. But I don’t think its a given that the drivers of these cars can assume that to a signficant degree they will be fuelled at someone else’s expense, still less that they are entitled to fuel them at someone else’s expense.
Yes, people charge up their phones, and sometimes there is an implied invitation to do so by the provision of a convenient power point at your coffee table or wherever. But the electricity cost of running an electric car is of an altogether different order of magnitude. An invitation to hook up one is not an invitation to hook up the other.
Again, I want to emphasize that I don’t really want debate about the morality of his actions of what should have happened. I’m specifically interested in what the law says in circumstances like this.
The article says, “Kamooneh said that the car, when plugged into a 110-volt outlet, draws a kilowatt an hour.” Which is incorrect. It uses a kilowatt. Which is also incorrect.
The specs say it has an onboard 6.6 kW charger. If it consumes 6.6 kW at 110v, in 20 minutes, that’s about 2.2 kWh. At the price I pay for home electricity that’s about $0.25.
Now, suppose I saw the school caretaker’s lawn mower with a can of gas next to it. And I poured $0.25 worth of gasoline out of the can into my car. That’s a little over a cup of gas. Does the small amount taken make this OK?
BTW an iPhone charger is rated at 5 watts; the car uses over a thousand times as much in the same time. Again, the amount isn’t the issue, but it doesn’t make sense to compare plugging in your phone vs. a car.