A single mother voluntarily engaging in unlawful activities which give rise to potentially $3 million and no less than $18,000 in damages and thereby putting her children in jeopardy shows an overwhelming degree of insensitivity.
Model Rules of Professional Conduct (adopted in some form by most jurisdictions, with similar and/or related rules in the remaining jurisdictions) 3.3(a)(2).
It's not that. It's that the lawyers have ethical duties relating to what authority they cite and possibly relating to an affirmative duty to disclose unfavorable legal authority.
Generally, each side gets a limited number of peremptory strikes - that means that each side can only kick off a certain number of jurors without giving any reason for it. This number varies by jurisdiction. 5 is actually a bit high, but within the range of what jurisdictions give you. (The only real exception is that the other side can accuse you of using your peremptory strikes to discriminate based on race, and then you have to articulate some reason other than race for kicking the guy off the jury.)
Then, there are for-cause challenges to a juror. You can usually challenge as many potential jurors as you want for a stated cause, such as apparent bias. This is why lawyers are always trying to root out bias in potential jurors. If there's someone you just don't want on the jury, and you can make him say something that indicates an unfair prejudice of any sort, you probably won't have to waste a peremptory strike on him.
Either admitting to illegal downloading or refusing to answer questions about it might just be enough to get you challenged for cause and kept off the jury.
I would love to sit in the courtroom during jury selection on these cases. "Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your hands if you have ever illegally downloaded an mp3." could keep the court busy for months trying to find enough jurors to go forward.
They were velociraptors in the novel. Whether it was Crichton, Spielberg, or someone else at fault for any inaccuracies in the visual description or portrayal of the creature, it was Crichton who wrote about velociraptors, and I somehow doubt that he did so in order to make his novel marketable to children.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to protect any revenue streams. I just know that the submitter said he was going to fight this every way he can - that implies that he doesn't care if he spends a few hundred pounds to hire representation, which is the best way he can fight this other than (a permissible objective of Slashdot, but not what he was talking about in his submission) telling millions of nerds worldwide not to shop at the offending store.
Fair enough, but he did say "I feel this has really gone against my statutory rights and I will do everything I can to fight it. I will review comments for your advice." Everything he can to fight a violation of his statutory rights starts with talking to a lawyer (probably a barrister, despite what another person said about them being called solicitors in England; there is a division between the two types but all of them are also known as lawyers, to my knowledge) who would know what those statutory rights are. If he really wants to do everything he can to fight it, then he shouldn't be concerned about paying a lawyer to fight it for him more effectively.
"Ask Slashdot" (the correct section) article asking for legal advice? Check.
Stop asking Slashdot and start talking to lawyers when you have this kind of problem and think that your "statutory rights" have been violated. Slashdot is almost guaranteed to be the worst place to get advice on anything other than technology and technology careers. Up next: "Ask Slashdot: My left labium is swollen, do I have the clap?"
It's interesting to note that the Texas statute defining the crime of kidnapping is actually not the section you quoted, and in fact does not apply to the situation we are discussing, but that's fine. You've given a code section, or at least a small part of one, that makes unlawful restraint a crime in Texas.
Your answer is, however, inadequate. Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code 124.001 provides that "[a] person who reasonably believes that another has stolen or is attempting to steal property is privileged to detain that person in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable time to investigate ownership of the property." This privilege is not limited to civil torts. The annotated copy of the Texas Code you've gone and made me dig up and dust off doesn't provide any cross-references or cases involving both statutes, so I suppose it's an open question, but on the face of the privilege statute it precludes prosecution for unlawful restraint as long as its elements are met.
Of course, you did manage to continue in your childishness. I am not a liar. You are the one still contending that the Texas and US Constitutions regulate individual behavior, that there was an assault in this case, that every single law in Texas and every other state supports your position, that a kidnapping occurred here, and that beating black people is analogous to reasonable detention of people whose behavior arises to the level of suspicion of shoplifting, that the Fifth Amendment has anything to do with the shopkeeper's privilege, and other things that simply aren't true.
I did imply that I'd respond if you chose option (1) and you did, although you did an astonishingly bad job of executing your choice. See you around.
There's a fundamental difference, though, and your continued use of an inflammatory red herring shows me that you don't believe in your own position. Refusing to show a receipt when store policy requires you to do so upon exiting the store with merchandise is objectively suspicious. Being black is not objectively suspicious. Again, your red herring doesn't change the point here.
Furthermore, you aren't just looking for kidnapping laws. You expressly stated that it is a crime to hold a customer under the shopkeeper's privilege when your ground for suspecting him of shoplifting is his refusal to show a receipt per your store's policy. If it's a crime, then there must be a statute that you can point me to that makes it a crime. If it's not, then you are wrong. Your analogy is not any more valid or distracting than it was the first couple of times you tried to use it.
You've made an explicit assertion that it is a crime to hold a customer for a reasonable time when he refuses to show a receipt upon leaving the store. You have three options that I can see: (1) Cite a specific law that makes it a crime to do so. (2) Admit that your assertion is false. (3) Continue your childish and irrelevant argument. Any choice other than (1) will draw no further response from me, even to correct any misconceptions you may be imparting to the Slashdot audience as I realize now I should not have attempted earlier in this thread. I suspect, however, that you've already made up your mind and that I won't have to deal with you again. Thus, goodbye.
You're still failing to actually cite any law that makes it a crime for a store to detain a customer on the store's property for a reasonable time to ascertain whether a shoplifting has taken place on the ground that the customer refused to show his receipt upon leaving the store, when that is required by store policy. Unless you can do that, you are talking out of your ass. I, of course, cannot prove a negative and will not attempt to do so. This has been the topic all along, as far as I'm aware, and my comments have been focused toward it. Don't impute your own lack of clarity and direction on me.
*sigh* I said I wasn't going to, but it's so painfully obvious what you are doing, and enough Slashdotters fall into the same pitfall that I feel compelled to correct your misconception. You are confused between criminal procedure and defenses to civil torts. The shopkeeper's privilege permits a shopkeeper to detain a suspected shoplifter, in certain circumstances much broader than you are talking about, without being held liable for the tort of wrongful imprisonment. If you can find consistent citations in all common law jurisdictions limiting the shopkeeper's privilege to the cases you are describing, go for it. (So far, your argument is of the form + "therefore, you are wrong and this is what the law is." Try to make it of the form "This is what the law is, because in the said so." That would make this a discussion instead of a special olympics allegory. I would gladly jump into a real discussion with you if you showed any interest in having one.)
On the other hand, there is the law of criminal procedure, which provides a much stricter set of rules to determine whether a search or seizure is reasonable under the Constitution. This has nothing to do with the shopkeeper's privilege at all.
I hope that this clarifies things for any Slashdotters still reading this discussion.
You are missing the shopkeeper's privilege. If a shopkeeper has reason to believe that you are shoplifting anything from his store, he may detain you in a reasonable way for a reasonable time in order to ascertain whether you actually have shoplifted anything. Your refusal to show a receipt when it is the store's policy to require you to show your receipt gives him reason to believe that you are shopkeeping. We've been over this and I really can't see why you're having such a hard time understanding why this is the case. Your red herring is still nice and inflammatory but still quite irrelevant, and your insistence on using it repeatedly tells me that this thread is one step away from Godwin territory. As a result, I'm through. Have fun with your winning argument.
That's a fabulous red herring you've thrown. Let's try this again, except without your misguided attempts at analogies (you may, by the way, want to get a specialist to look at that for you). Can you point to the specific law that makes it illegal to require customers to show their receipts before leaving the store and to detain them for a reasonable time to make certain they aren't shoplifting when they refuse to show their receipts?
My point was that, if you know about the policy then you consent to it by entering the store. If you know about the policy and don't consent to it, your recourse is not to enter. I could be wrong on this, of course, but it does seem that stores with a "show your receipt" policy don't have any trouble enforcing it.
You must be talking about something from TFA. Of course, that also means you must be new here. The Slashdot blurb said nothing about whether or not he was suspected of shoplifting. Then again, for stores that have a policy of requiring you to show a receipt on the way out (a policy to which you implicitly consent by being in such a store and purchasing its wares), there may be a reasonable suspicion that you are shoplifting if you refuse to abide by the policy.
Thanks to you and to the sibling post for clarifying that bit of the story. Holding the door open may or may not have been reasonable under the circumstances, but the police definitely seem to have gone too far in this whole thing (realizing that their arrest was unlawful because it was premised upon the supposed violation of something that is apparently not a law in Ohio and reacting by charging the customer with something else that makes no sense given that the arrest was unlawful). I'm sure that we'll never hear how it comes out in the end, though, because things are only news when and to the extent that they piss people off.
Read up on the shopkeeper's privilege. In most jurisdictions, the store can detain a suspected shoplifter for a reasonable time to figure out if he is in fact shoplifting. The privilege is limited but it has real teeth. You can't sue a store for unlawfully detaining you if it was acting within the scope of the privilege, for instance.
Of course, what happened here was quite a bit different. The store called the police to come intervene, and that in itself may have been within the scope of the shopkeeper's privilege (if the time and manner of detention was reasonable and on the store's premises, which would typically include its parking lot as seems to be the situation in this story). But the police then overstepped their bounds by a long shot.
The store is probably safe from any lawsuits. The police, on the other hand, may be subject to a wrongful arrest claim or the like. As to the point about any evidence the police may have found being inadmissible, that is a much finer point than can be determined from what this story presents.
IANAL, and especially IANA(Ohio)L. #include <ianal-disclaimer.h>
Slashdot Mirror
A single mother voluntarily engaging in unlawful activities which give rise to potentially $3 million and no less than $18,000 in damages and thereby putting her children in jeopardy shows an overwhelming degree of insensitivity.
Model Rules of Professional Conduct (adopted in some form by most jurisdictions, with similar and/or related rules in the remaining jurisdictions) 3.3(a)(2).
It's not that. It's that the lawyers have ethical duties relating to what authority they cite and possibly relating to an affirmative duty to disclose unfavorable legal authority.
I wonder if this would let me properly play Summer Nights by Van Halen without having to track down a Steinberger of the appropriate vintage.
Generally, each side gets a limited number of peremptory strikes - that means that each side can only kick off a certain number of jurors without giving any reason for it. This number varies by jurisdiction. 5 is actually a bit high, but within the range of what jurisdictions give you. (The only real exception is that the other side can accuse you of using your peremptory strikes to discriminate based on race, and then you have to articulate some reason other than race for kicking the guy off the jury.)
Then, there are for-cause challenges to a juror. You can usually challenge as many potential jurors as you want for a stated cause, such as apparent bias. This is why lawyers are always trying to root out bias in potential jurors. If there's someone you just don't want on the jury, and you can make him say something that indicates an unfair prejudice of any sort, you probably won't have to waste a peremptory strike on him.
Either admitting to illegal downloading or refusing to answer questions about it might just be enough to get you challenged for cause and kept off the jury.
I would love to sit in the courtroom during jury selection on these cases. "Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your hands if you have ever illegally downloaded an mp3." could keep the court busy for months trying to find enough jurors to go forward.
They were velociraptors in the novel. Whether it was Crichton, Spielberg, or someone else at fault for any inaccuracies in the visual description or portrayal of the creature, it was Crichton who wrote about velociraptors, and I somehow doubt that he did so in order to make his novel marketable to children.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to protect any revenue streams. I just know that the submitter said he was going to fight this every way he can - that implies that he doesn't care if he spends a few hundred pounds to hire representation, which is the best way he can fight this other than (a permissible objective of Slashdot, but not what he was talking about in his submission) telling millions of nerds worldwide not to shop at the offending store.
Fair enough, but he did say "I feel this has really gone against my statutory rights and I will do everything I can to fight it. I will review comments for your advice." Everything he can to fight a violation of his statutory rights starts with talking to a lawyer (probably a barrister, despite what another person said about them being called solicitors in England; there is a division between the two types but all of them are also known as lawyers, to my knowledge) who would know what those statutory rights are. If he really wants to do everything he can to fight it, then he shouldn't be concerned about paying a lawyer to fight it for him more effectively.
I'm at least realistic about it. Natalie Portman isn't going to hang around on Slashdot. Chicks with swollen labia and/or the clap might. :P
"Ask Slashdot" (the correct section) article asking for legal advice? Check.
Stop asking Slashdot and start talking to lawyers when you have this kind of problem and think that your "statutory rights" have been violated. Slashdot is almost guaranteed to be the worst place to get advice on anything other than technology and technology careers. Up next: "Ask Slashdot: My left labium is swollen, do I have the clap?"
It's interesting to note that the Texas statute defining the crime of kidnapping is actually not the section you quoted, and in fact does not apply to the situation we are discussing, but that's fine. You've given a code section, or at least a small part of one, that makes unlawful restraint a crime in Texas.
Your answer is, however, inadequate. Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code 124.001 provides that "[a] person who reasonably believes that another has stolen or is attempting to steal property is privileged to detain that person in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable time to investigate ownership of the property." This privilege is not limited to civil torts. The annotated copy of the Texas Code you've gone and made me dig up and dust off doesn't provide any cross-references or cases involving both statutes, so I suppose it's an open question, but on the face of the privilege statute it precludes prosecution for unlawful restraint as long as its elements are met.
Of course, you did manage to continue in your childishness. I am not a liar. You are the one still contending that the Texas and US Constitutions regulate individual behavior, that there was an assault in this case, that every single law in Texas and every other state supports your position, that a kidnapping occurred here, and that beating black people is analogous to reasonable detention of people whose behavior arises to the level of suspicion of shoplifting, that the Fifth Amendment has anything to do with the shopkeeper's privilege, and other things that simply aren't true.
I did imply that I'd respond if you chose option (1) and you did, although you did an astonishingly bad job of executing your choice. See you around.
There's a fundamental difference, though, and your continued use of an inflammatory red herring shows me that you don't believe in your own position. Refusing to show a receipt when store policy requires you to do so upon exiting the store with merchandise is objectively suspicious. Being black is not objectively suspicious. Again, your red herring doesn't change the point here.
Furthermore, you aren't just looking for kidnapping laws. You expressly stated that it is a crime to hold a customer under the shopkeeper's privilege when your ground for suspecting him of shoplifting is his refusal to show a receipt per your store's policy. If it's a crime, then there must be a statute that you can point me to that makes it a crime. If it's not, then you are wrong. Your analogy is not any more valid or distracting than it was the first couple of times you tried to use it.
You've made an explicit assertion that it is a crime to hold a customer for a reasonable time when he refuses to show a receipt upon leaving the store. You have three options that I can see: (1) Cite a specific law that makes it a crime to do so. (2) Admit that your assertion is false. (3) Continue your childish and irrelevant argument. Any choice other than (1) will draw no further response from me, even to correct any misconceptions you may be imparting to the Slashdot audience as I realize now I should not have attempted earlier in this thread. I suspect, however, that you've already made up your mind and that I won't have to deal with you again. Thus, goodbye.
You're still failing to actually cite any law that makes it a crime for a store to detain a customer on the store's property for a reasonable time to ascertain whether a shoplifting has taken place on the ground that the customer refused to show his receipt upon leaving the store, when that is required by store policy. Unless you can do that, you are talking out of your ass. I, of course, cannot prove a negative and will not attempt to do so. This has been the topic all along, as far as I'm aware, and my comments have been focused toward it. Don't impute your own lack of clarity and direction on me.
Fucking People's Front of Mac Serial Junkie...
I've never used uTorrent, but check out Transmission for your Mac.
*sigh* I said I wasn't going to, but it's so painfully obvious what you are doing, and enough Slashdotters fall into the same pitfall that I feel compelled to correct your misconception. You are confused between criminal procedure and defenses to civil torts. The shopkeeper's privilege permits a shopkeeper to detain a suspected shoplifter, in certain circumstances much broader than you are talking about, without being held liable for the tort of wrongful imprisonment. If you can find consistent citations in all common law jurisdictions limiting the shopkeeper's privilege to the cases you are describing, go for it. (So far, your argument is of the form + "therefore, you are wrong and this is what the law is." Try to make it of the form "This is what the law is, because in the said so." That would make this a discussion instead of a special olympics allegory. I would gladly jump into a real discussion with you if you showed any interest in having one.)
On the other hand, there is the law of criminal procedure, which provides a much stricter set of rules to determine whether a search or seizure is reasonable under the Constitution. This has nothing to do with the shopkeeper's privilege at all.
I hope that this clarifies things for any Slashdotters still reading this discussion.
You are missing the shopkeeper's privilege. If a shopkeeper has reason to believe that you are shoplifting anything from his store, he may detain you in a reasonable way for a reasonable time in order to ascertain whether you actually have shoplifted anything. Your refusal to show a receipt when it is the store's policy to require you to show your receipt gives him reason to believe that you are shopkeeping. We've been over this and I really can't see why you're having such a hard time understanding why this is the case. Your red herring is still nice and inflammatory but still quite irrelevant, and your insistence on using it repeatedly tells me that this thread is one step away from Godwin territory. As a result, I'm through. Have fun with your winning argument.
That's a fabulous red herring you've thrown. Let's try this again, except without your misguided attempts at analogies (you may, by the way, want to get a specialist to look at that for you). Can you point to the specific law that makes it illegal to require customers to show their receipts before leaving the store and to detain them for a reasonable time to make certain they aren't shoplifting when they refuse to show their receipts?
My point was that, if you know about the policy then you consent to it by entering the store. If you know about the policy and don't consent to it, your recourse is not to enter. I could be wrong on this, of course, but it does seem that stores with a "show your receipt" policy don't have any trouble enforcing it.
Some people don't have uncles. Omit needless words. :P
The only group worth joining:
Fuck you, you fucking fuck.
That basically takes care of everything.
You must be talking about something from TFA. Of course, that also means you must be new here. The Slashdot blurb said nothing about whether or not he was suspected of shoplifting. Then again, for stores that have a policy of requiring you to show a receipt on the way out (a policy to which you implicitly consent by being in such a store and purchasing its wares), there may be a reasonable suspicion that you are shoplifting if you refuse to abide by the policy.
Thanks to you and to the sibling post for clarifying that bit of the story. Holding the door open may or may not have been reasonable under the circumstances, but the police definitely seem to have gone too far in this whole thing (realizing that their arrest was unlawful because it was premised upon the supposed violation of something that is apparently not a law in Ohio and reacting by charging the customer with something else that makes no sense given that the arrest was unlawful). I'm sure that we'll never hear how it comes out in the end, though, because things are only news when and to the extent that they piss people off.
Read up on the shopkeeper's privilege. In most jurisdictions, the store can detain a suspected shoplifter for a reasonable time to figure out if he is in fact shoplifting. The privilege is limited but it has real teeth. You can't sue a store for unlawfully detaining you if it was acting within the scope of the privilege, for instance.
Of course, what happened here was quite a bit different. The store called the police to come intervene, and that in itself may have been within the scope of the shopkeeper's privilege (if the time and manner of detention was reasonable and on the store's premises, which would typically include its parking lot as seems to be the situation in this story). But the police then overstepped their bounds by a long shot.
The store is probably safe from any lawsuits. The police, on the other hand, may be subject to a wrongful arrest claim or the like. As to the point about any evidence the police may have found being inadmissible, that is a much finer point than can be determined from what this story presents.
IANAL, and especially IANA(Ohio)L. #include <ianal-disclaimer.h>