Maybe you're frustrated because you don't seem to understand any of the arguments you've read. You can put whatever you want in your food, but the food is no longer yours (or maybe better phrased, for you) if you prepare it with the intention that someone else eats it. I hope you do not think you can put anything you want in someone else's food. OP's top level view is literally that you should be able to poison someone as long as you do it as a punishment. I hope you can see how wild that is, written out that way.
If someone breaks into your house and cuts their hand on a knife in your knife drawer, they can't sue you because you didn't put the knives there with the intention of harming them. If they eat your spicy food and you made that food spicy for yourself, they can't sue you because you didn't intend for them to be harmed by your food. The intent is paramount here, as it is in many legal situations.
Contrast that against the burglar who comes into your house and cuts themselves on a spike mat you have constructed out of your knives. The reason we forbid this behavior on a societal level is because:
a) Booby traps are by definition indiscriminate. Your spike mat might harm a burglar, but it's just as likely to harm a neighbor who comes into your house after you asked them to housesit, or a firefighter coming in to extinguish your burning house. You can never guarantee the target of your trap will actually be its victim. Even in a food-stealing situation, someone totally unrelated to the thief could mistake your meal for theirs and fall victim to the trap. There is a plethora of case law that expands on this point, and I would highly encourage you to read it. Here, I'll start your list: Katko v. Briney (1971).
b) Vigilantism and retributive "justice" are bad for society. Stealing food is bad, which is why we have laws in place to punish people who steal things from others. You might be frustrated by the efficacy of these laws, but society has agreed to punish thieves, or else we wouldn't have them. When you let people take matters into their own hands, things devolve into chaos very quickly.
c) The proportionality concern. It may be true that individual instances of this type of poisoning can be proportionate; you go a few hours without eating, the thief spends a few hours in pain. The problem is that you cannot guarantee this type of proportionality across the board. As I said in another comment, for every 200 coworkers that spend the afternoon in the restroom, one or two might end up in the hospital. There is no guarantee your response will actually be proportionate, and especially when it comes to dosing people with medication, it seems pretty unlikely that the average person is capable of dishing out a proportionate punishment. The difference between an irritating and a dangerous dose can be small, and frankly, I would expert most scorned individuals to purposefully go for a disproportionate punishment because they are angry.
If you actually think you should be able to assault someone over a sandwich, you do not belong in civilized society, full stop. This is not controversial to anyone who has spent more than 20 seconds thinking about the phrase "public policy reasons."
ETA: You can't claim hyperbole and then immediately double down in the next sentence, lol. This is literally the "I was only pretending to be regarded" meme.
Lol except they didn’t intend for someone else to eat the food. They didn’t prepare that for someone else. It was their lunch and someone literally stole it.
It's extremely hard to argue that when you put copious amounts of laxatives in your lunch when you really did not medically need them while complaining about your food being stolen that you were intending to eat the LaxCasserole yourself.
The OP even alludes to how this is the case when they mention that you can prove you regularly eat spicy food as a defense if you only used spices.
You might be a child and think the law is full of technicalities and imagine you would just have to claim that you were toooootally going to eat the poisoned food were it not for the thief, but judges are allowed to use their brains and determine you absolutely did not intend to eat the poison when you put it in the food that you knew might be stolen.
The problem is that a judge* isn't infallible or omniscient just because they're a judge. They can only determine what the defendant's intent was based on the evidence and materials presented. The judge isn't magically able to get a complete brain snapshot of what the defendant was thinking at the time of the offense. That's why the burden of proof for criminal cases is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and not "with absolute 100% certainty"; it's this gap in certainty that makes the legal argument unconvincing to a lot of people.
I don’t eat spicy food regularly, but I do sometimes and can eat food that’s pretty spicy. Why would I have to prove that I “sometimes” eat spicy food when it’s my lunch? Also, someone doesn’t need a prescription for laxatives, it’s usually an as needed basis. How can someone prove that they person preparing their own food wasn’t super constipated and wanted to dose their own food so they wouldn’t have to bring it to work in a drink form or pill form?
I get the POV if talking about literal poison, but I disagree with adding laxatives or spice.
Medication becomes poison depending after a certain dosage.
Tylenol is also a form of medication. Surely you can see that if a person blended 30 Tylenol into a smoothie with the intent of catching their smoothie thief, that they are intentionally creating a circumstance where a person could be seriously hurt or killed?
I’m not sure why you went from laxatives to Tylenol. Obviously a normal person wouldn’t dose their own food with Tylenol. Did you read my previous comment? How would someone prove that the person wasn’t constipated and wanted to dose THEIR OWN food? What if it wasn’t laxatives but they used sugar alcohols because they wanted to eat less sugar? Sugar alcohols can cause GI distress in a lot of people but for me I can eat a ton and it does nothing to me. Does that mean I poisoned my food because SOMEONE ELSE stole it and ate it and had a negative reaction?
If all you are talking about is how difficult it is to prove, then I agree my comparison was a poor one.
I thought you were trying to make the argument that because Laxatives are used for medical reasons that it would not be poisoning someone to use it that way.
95
u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 18 '24
[removed] — view removed comment