Posted on 05/07/2012 9:02:03 AM PDT by marktwain
Imagine the horror of having your home or business plundered by thieves. Not a good feeling, but even harder to fathom that the bad guys who did it could end up suing you in court.
State lawmakers say an existing legal loophole allows thieves to file civil lawsuits against home and business owners if they end up getting injured while intruding. But a bill working its way through the Alabama State Legislature would put an end to the practice.
If approved, House Bill 46 would grant immunity to property owners from civil lawsuits by criminals in almost all circumstances. State Senator Arthur Orr (R) of Decatur is one of the bill’s supporters, and says the proposed law is long overdue.
“If this bill is passed, no more of this in Alabama,” said Orr, who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that recently cleared the bill. “It would put a stop to what I would consider frivolous lawsuits by criminals, and not letting them profit for being somewhere that they should not have been in the first place.”
Orr said there have been instances where thieves filed lawsuits against their intended victims, and even won monetary judgments in some cases. Some of the thieves were injured by property owners acting in self-defense, while other criminals harmed themselves through accidents at the crime scene, such as tripping over a piece of furniture.
House Bill 46 has already passed unanimously through the Alabama State House, and now awaits a vote in the State Senate.
Alabama’s current “Castle Doctrine” law already grants wide-ranging protection to property owners in the criminal half of the court system.
A good addition to castle doctrine... this is part of the reason why sharpton is suing... getting money from neighborhood watch places...
Agreed, though it is a shame that such a law even needs to be passed as common sense should dictate such suits are banned.
The jury system only works well when there is a reasonably educated jury. Tort claims are no longer decided based on fact - they are decided based on the skill of the lawyers involved and their ability to play on the emotions of jurors.
—Agreed, though it is a shame that such a law even needs to be passed as common sense should dictate such suits are banned.—
Yeah. Your post reflected what I was thinking as I read this article. That this sort of stuff gets through jury trials is not a good reflection on the quality of the US culture.
Pure Comparative means almost all tort suits go to the jury. The lawyer best able to “work” the jury (Edwards!)will win; the law and the facts become almost meaningless.
Much sanity coming out of Sweet Home Alabama these days.
A plethora of wisdom compared to so-called “smarter” states.
Yep, welcome to the biggoted automatic bureaucratic thinking of welfare:”the man is always wrong and the one who must fix everything... because he can, you know, redistribution obliges”
This is this sort of 5 year old feminist culture that pervades everywhere, and lawyers bring it up into a language of “humaneness” everytime, getting corrupt politico jurors to side with them.
I’m a native Californian and even our sick state partially banned such suits back in the 1970’s. A burglar was climbing on a roof seeking to enter a building and fell through a skylight.He collected $800,000. That case motivated our degenerate legislature to pass remedial legislation. However, the criminal must be convicted of a felony, a misdemeanor will not ban the suit. Given the heavy use of plea deals one can have a burglar convicted of a misdemeanor.
Castle doctrine laws include a civil immunity clause. It is a tort reform issue that trial lawyers and slap suit happy anti-second amendment groups simply loath.
These sue the victim suits arrise from an old line of spring gun booby trap cases where a thief was injured because he set off a booby trap. Tort lawyers and anti property right groups took this to the extreme via insurance claims and moron juries.
That’s RAAACCIIIIIIST!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.