The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 13: I Had No Choice!
Necessity pg 12: Objective Test
Becky explaining herself
BECKY
But wait! I really thought that destroying the house wasn’t as bad as losing my car!
It doesn’t matter. We do care what you believed when it comes to the imminence of danger, but when it comes to the lesser of two evils, the law weighs them objectively.
And someone’s home is gonna outweigh your car, no matter how nice your car might be.
Scales weighing a house and a car, the house weighs more, there’s a check mark by the house and an X by the car.
(Also, even if Becky was protecting an orphanage, there’s going to be a question of how immediate the need was to raze the last house on the block, far away from the actual fire.
A jury’s going to have a hard time believing that Becky actually thought the danger was truly imminent.”
Well, if it’s a really, really good car and a really, really cheap house…
How likely is it that a really nice car would be next to a shitty house…. nevermind, I’ve seen that stuff in the inner city, someone going into horrendous debt to have a nice car… until it gets repoed.
Yeah, a high end Bentley can cost almost $300,000, thats more than alot of homes in the mid-west. Let alone if the car were an exotic, such as, a Bugatti Veyron which can cost over two milllion dollars.
I presume it’s not quite so simple as slapping a dollar value on things though. No matter how nice the car is, it’s worth less to you than the house is to it’s owner. And the fact that you only saved your property will probably matter too, compared to the hero who saved other people’s houses.
How much of this is specified in statutes and how much is jury discretion is of course a good question.
You really can’t say that the car is worth less to its owner than the house is to the house’s owner, not even if you knew what price each party paid for their respective properties. Economic value is subjective. Something could be worth $1,000,000 to me even if it is worth $0 to everyone else in the world and cost me nothing to acquire. However, you can circumvent arguments about economic value in this case by asserting that the mere fact that party A intentionally destroyed Party B’s property without Party B’s permission, just to save Party A’s property, nullifies whatever interests Party A had in maintaining that property in that case.
Wait, didn’t she destroy the house, when the other evil would have been both the house and the bentley (more expensive, of course, than the house itself)? So wouldn’t the lesser of two evils still apply?
No. She caused the house to be destroyed in order to protect her own property. Regardless of whether or not the house and the car would have been destroyed anyway isn’t the point. Also, as he points out, Becky destroyed the house at the end of the block instead of closer to the actual fire.
Sure we can say that a 300k Bentley is worth less than my 200k house. I need a place to live more than she needs to drive a specific car.