Come on, man.
Alternative headline: Get ready for the jury you really want to be on.
Remember this NFL play of the week from the October 3 game in San Francisco? The Rams didn’t do much against the 49ers, but they had at least one defensive highlight worth noting. An idiot with an incendiary device ran onto the field during the game to make some dimwitted animal-rights protest, and suddenly veered toward the Rams’ bench.
This was not a particularly wise strategy, as defensive stars Bobby Wagner and Takkarist McKinley demonstrated:
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The moral of this story is: If you want to run onto the field in an NFL game, you’d better bring a helmet and pads, and leave your incendiary device at home. The foresaid idiot, one Alexander Joseph Taylor, ended up getting a concussion, burned by his own device, and arrested. The protest was over two men getting prosecuted over releasing piglets from a Utah factory, and performed on behalf of an outfit called Direct Action Everywhere.
It turns out, however, that Taylor doesn’t appreciate Direct Action Everywhere after all. He’s hired an attorney who’s threatening to sue the Wagner for taking direct action to end the potential threat to himself and others on the field, after apparently first attempting to get police to arrest Wagner. NBC reported that his attorney made the threat more plain Tuesday:
Alexander Joseph Taylor, 30, filed a police report the day after he was tackled stating he had “a headache, a concussion without loss of consciousness, and a burn on his inner right bicep.”
“Mr. Taylor sustained significant injuries as a result of Bobby Wagner’s actions,” his attorney, Bonnie S. Klapper, said. “We are evaluating our options as to how to proceed from here.”
This raises some questions — legal, moral, and cultural — but not terribly difficult questions. Jonathan Turley dispensed with the legal questions a few days ago about prospects for a lawsuit from Taylor, especially given the dangerous nature of the device — which Taylor’s injuries demonstrate pretty well:
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However, not only is another court likely to find that there was no right to rescue in a case involving the theft of pigs by animal activists, this activist is likely to establish that the players had a right to tackle. …
There is also a common law privilege in any civil lawsuit that allows for defense of others. The protester was carrying a flare and appears to have resulted in burns to his own body. In that short period of time, the appearance of a man running with the flare and being chased by security could be viewed as a reasonable basis to force to protect others.
Just as tackles on the field are judged by the use and level of force in possible “roughing the passer” fouls, the same is true under the common law. In the use of the defense of others in torts, a person must show that he used a reasonable and proportionate amount of force.
The video shows the players taking the protester to the ground and then leaving him to security. That would seem to meet the standard on the level of force. This would not amount to a common law version of “roughing the protester.”
Turley also implicitly addresses the moral issue of encouraging citizen intervention against threats to the public, which you can read at the link. Common law anticipates this for a reason, because it sets an incentive against such behavior by accommodating an immediate response. No one, especially in this day and age, can presume that idiots creating mayhem in a public place or event are benign, or that even a benign intent will not transform into a malign action at some point. By allowing for that common response to a threat in law, it provides a good reason not to engage in those kinds of threatening and disruptive behaviors in the first place.
Wagner’s actions and the outcome demonstrate this rather well, in fact. Wagner clearly didn’t want to wait around to find out whether this unannounced and unwelcome intervenor with an incendiary device amounted to a threat or not. Instead, he took action to make sure any potential threat was neutralized. Reversing this to require people to know for a fact that such an intrusion is a threat not only leaves everyone more vulnerable, it also incentivizes more of this public mayhem and will then incentivize escalations of it.
And culturally, all that will create is rot and eventually vigilantism as public order breaks down. People are already cheering now when drivers beat protesters blocking streets and highways, and on more than one occasion drivers have just started to plow through them. Rather than enforce the public-safety limits on demonstrations, law enforcement agencies have been cowed into retreat, when they show up at all. The very reasonable federal law prohibiting protests at the houses of judges has gone unenforced for months by the Department of Justice, for instance, even after a serious attempt to assassinate a Supreme Court justice.
We have ample ability to legally and peacefully protest in the United States. If we choose not to enforce those limits, eventually other incentives will emerge. And when they do, we will indeed see direct action everywhere, including and especially against the idiotic “direct actors.”
In the meantime, I hope these case goes to trial just to see what happens. If I could be guaranteed a seat on the jury, it might be the only reason I’d ever move back to California.
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