To consume 6.6kW at 110 V, it would have to draw 60 amps. A typical outlet is rated for 15 amps. So you’re looking at 1/4 the usage you calculated. Or close to the 5 cents he claimed.
The 6.6 kW figure would be for a 240 V outlet, rated for more amps than a typical 110 V outlet.
Obviously the law varies from place to place but, in general, plugging into someone else’s electricity supply and drawing power out of it, without their permission, is an offence. Somebody is paying for that power. It’s not you. You know this. There may or may not be a specific offence of “abstracting electricity”, or it may be embraced in some wider theft offence, but it’s going to be an offence.
Depending on on local law, it may be defence to say that you honestly believed that you had permission, or possibly that you honestly and reasonably believed that. It won’t be a defence that the electricity was only worth 5 cents, but that might be relevant to a claim that your belief that you were allowed to do this was reasonable.
And a huge amount is going to dependon context and circumstance. You can easily envisage circumstances in which a plug socket mounted on every table in a coffee shop, or a plug socket beside every chair in an airport lounge, is honestly and reasonably (and probably correctly) interpreted as an invitation to charge your phone. But it wouldn’t follow that a plug socket on the outside of a school building amounted to a invitation to charge your car. And, in fact, as long as electric cars are so comparatively rare, that might argue strongly against the mere availability of a plug socket being reasonably understood as an invitation to charge your car. The socket is likely to be there for some other purpose.
We’re not told, in the case cited in the OP, whether the car was parked in a designated parking space, and the plug socket was positioned in such a way as to suggest it was there for the convenience of people using that space, but that is the kind of detail that might be relevant if the defendant was relying on an honest/reasonable belief defence.
We’re talking about electrical power like it’s a thing that moves, but it’s not. I’m not sure the gasoline analogy holds up, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t, either. It’s kind of like slipping a belt onto a water-powered mill without permission.
If I stick a little pinwheel-powered battery charger under someone’s car, have I stolen their gasoline? Sort of. But it doesn’t seem the same as actually taking some gas.
He can always argue that for every electron he took out of the socket, he sent one back !
The point is that electricity costs money. I draw the power; you get billed for it. Doing that without your permission is always going to be an offence. Procrustus has cited a theft law from Washington state where “theft” is defined in a way that covers taking services. Not all jurisdictions will take this particular approach, but it’s a safe bet that they all have some way of criminalising the taking of electricity without the consent of the person who pays for it. And since the guy has been charged with theft in Georgia rather than with some more specific offence, I’m guessing that Georgia law deals with the theft of power or energy by classing it as theft, rather than by creating some more specific offence.
A certain amount is being made of the fact that the value of the electricity taken in the OP is somewhere around the 5 cents mark. Of course, that’s only the case because his attempt to take electricity was interrupted after 20 minutes. If he’d stuck around for a two-hour tennis game, and then waited while his son had a shower, and then went for a coffee, it would be rather more. Still a modest amount, of course. If there had been a 240v supply instead of a 110v supply, it would have been more again. Still, a comparatively modest amount, but there is no cut-off for theft and theft-type laws which says, if it’s less than 50c (or whatever) it’s not theft.
It really comes down to this; can this guy reasonably assume that, if a school allows students to charge their laptops and phones from the school power supply while on the premises, it similarly allows students’ parents to charge their cars from the school’s power supply? Myself, I don’t think that he can, but he may find a judge who disagrees.
This is the equivalent of swiping a mint off of the convenience store counter, where it’s been offered for sale at five cents. That’s a case of theft which demonstrates that the value of the theft is not relevant (except in determining whether it’s a misdemeanor or a felony). If you take something of value without explicit or implied permission to do so, it’s theft, regardless of whether it’s “publicly accessible.”
I suppose the court case will come down to whether there was implied permission to use the electrical outlets in the same way that a visitor has implied permission to take water from the drinking fountains.
Ok, what about this one? SeaTac Airport parking garage as about 20 spaces for electric cars and a place to plug in (110 outlet) for each. One day they were all full, but I found a spot on the 8th floor near an outlet and plugged in. I assumed that since they were willing to give me free electricity on the 5th floor, they wouldn’t mind if I took some on the 8th.
Some high use commercial customers get charged a much higher rate for power, here called ‘demand’ charge. When your usage ‘spikes’ you buy power for about 100x the going rate + the going rate (yes 100 times the normal rate). By plugging in a car you may cause that spike in which your $0.05 cents worth of power becomes $5.05 worth + all additional power used during this time also gets charged 100x also.
So this may not be such a low value incident. Someone wanting to save money by not buying gas, but using electric instead could actually be causing more money to be spend on transportation ‘fuel’.
As fascinated as I am by electric car brouhaha, here’s a different example. In Los Angeles, we have lots of fruit trees. It is legal for the public to harvest fruit from a privately owned tree if the fruit overhangs a public space–typically the sidewalk, maybe the easement counts too. Not sure if this is a city, county, or state law.
Under Georgia law, this would be either theft by taking or theft of services. Here are the relevant statutory provisions:
§ 16-8-2. Theft by taking
A person commits the offense of theft by taking when he unlawfully takes or, being in lawful possession thereof, unlawfully appropriates any property of another with the intention of depriving him of the property, regardless of the manner in which the property is taken or appropriated.
§ 16-8-5. Theft of services
A person commits the offense of theft of services when by deception and with the intent to avoid payment he knowingly obtains services, accommodations, entertainment, or the use of personal property which is available only for compensation.
The article implies that the defendant will assert three defenses. First, he will argue that he lacked the necessary intent because he believed the electricity was freely available for public use. That’s kind of a stupid argument, because it relies on his own unreasonability; he should know that the school’s electricity is not a public good. This is different from public water fountains, or electrical outlets in an airport or coffeshop, where the public may reasonably suppose that public use ia allowed. Still, it might work, depending on the facts.
Second, he will argue selective prosecution: That he has been singled out, for invidious reasons, for a crime that others are allowed to commit with impunity. That defense may be undercut if the police officer is accurate in saying he would arrest anyone for this.
Third, he will argue the doctrine of de minimis non curat lex: the law does not concern itself with trifles. That one may well be a winner. Most judges would probably dismiss the case as insignificant.
Another defense might be that the act of plugging your car, iPhone, whatever into a publicly accessible outlet is not deceptive absent some type of specifically deceptive conduct such as forging an employee id card, falsely claiming to have been authorized by the property owner, or concealing your act of charging by covering it with an Under Construction sign. If I plug my phone into an outlet and act casually, it’s hard to come up with an argument that passersby do not know what I am doing or that I am intentionally using lies, disguises, false identification cards, Jedi mind tricks, etc. to prevent people from discovering what is really going on.
This. An entire library or airport of people charging their phones or laptops doesn’t equal charging one Leaf. The cost of installing and maintaining a plethora of sockets, in the first case, completely obliterates the cost of juicing them. OTOH, a car could suck down several dollars’ worth of electricity during the it takes to order and eat a plate meal.
I agree with this. The small amount of electricity he stole coupled with the fact that he honestly, but unreasonably, believed that he was permitted to do what he did should make the judge or the prosecutor dismiss the charge.
If he had stolen a 5 cent mint from a convenience store counter, then it would be clear that he had a guilty mind, but that isn’t present here and justice does not demand that this guy be convicted.
It might be a defense based on the principle of de minimis non curat lex.
To make an analogy, a lot of companies permit employees to use the company’s internet connection for personal reasons during work time. But this is subject to a reasonableness test. Few, if any, managers are going to care if you check out your sister’s vacation photos for 5 minutes at 3pm. Few, if any, managers will let you stream movies all day and not get your work done.
Yes, that’s a good point with respect to theft of services, but theft by taking is probably the stronger charge and does not require the element of deception.
Although the statutory text does not say so, we can safely assume that it is a required element of criminal theft in all states that the person know that the item is not being offered for free.
So I think the answer to the OP’s question is this: for any given “publicly accessible thing on private property,” did the person taking it actually believe it was being offered to them for free? If yes, not guilty. If no, guilty. As a practical matter, since we do not have the ability to read minds, a jury would decide whether the person was credible or whether a reasonable person in his shoes could not have known–but that’s not actually the legal question, which is the person’a actual knowledge.
Obviously, that only answers the criminal law question. As a matter of civil law, there are a number of applicable torts that would not require actual knowledge concerning the not-free status of the item, from negligence to conversion.
Here’s another article, with some more detail.
So, according to the police chief, he was really arrested for contempt of cop.
What was the cop doing inside his car?
I can see him unplugging it, and on behalf of the school or state questioning this man, but it just seemed like he went way too far.
According to the chief. The perp says the cop was confrontational. While I know it’s never smart to defy or face off with a cop, I can’t fault the guy for mouthing off to him.
I do find it a little disturbing that the linked article uses a generic photo of a Leaf without saying so. (Photo is red, article says the perp’s car was white.) There’s a small level of deception there that troubles me. But look at me, talking as if “journalism” was still a functional word.
No. He was arrested for:
You can’t do that.
Well I’m going to keep doing it.