Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Lawyer Friends: Please tell me CSI was wrong about this

I just happened to catch a bit of a repeat of CSI episode “Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda”.

There was a part of the story that really bothered me, but IANAL so I thought I’d ask it here in the hopes that someone who knows something about the law would chime in.

In the story, two boys were driving along playing Mailbox Baseball: they were driving along hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat.

One man, after having his mailbox routinely vandalized, replaced his mailbox with one filled with cement.

The boys came back again, and the one with the bat hit the cement mailbox. The bat bounced back, hit the driver in the head. The car crashed and they both died.

The CSI folks figured out what happened, and arrested him on “two counts of negligent homicide.”

The first time I saw the episode, and again when I saw the repeat, I thought to myself, “Oh, come on…”

I realize it’s just a TV show, but first of all that sounds more like my layman’s understanding of “manslaughter” and secondly they were destroying his private property.

Imagine someone had an electric fence around their property, and you tried to break in. You didn’t know the fence was electrified, and happened to be standing in a puddle or some other weird thing happened so that when you were trying to tresspass, you ended up getting electrocuted and died.

How is that the fault of the person who put up the electric fence? Why is it not the fault of the person doing something illegal? Nobody wanted/intended for anyone to die, but blaming the person protecting their personal property for a crazy accident that happened because someone else was doing something illegal? That just seems backwards.

So, ok lawyer friends, tell me what I’m missing. (And I’ll tell you this: if you’re the prosecuting attorney on this case, you don’t want me on the jury.)