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To: justlurking
Without intent, it isn't theft.

I didn't mean to steal your car. It was purely accidental.
67 posted on 08/21/2003 11:06:11 AM PDT by Bush2000
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To: Bush2000
I didn't mean to steal your car. It was purely accidental.

Let me give you a hint: when you resort to sarcasm in a lame attempt to avoid the issue, you have effectively admitted that you were wrong.

You may not believe that you are doing so, but that's how everyone else (except your chorus of lackeys) interprets it.

71 posted on 08/21/2003 11:13:24 AM PDT by justlurking
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To: Bush2000
I didn't mean to steal your car. It was purely accidental.

You are aware that the law makes a distinction between car theft and joyriding, aren't you? And if you borrow a friend's car but forget to take the registration and a police officer pulls you over. Should he immediately assume that you've stolen the car and throw you in jail. Since you seem to feel that failure to produce documentation of ownership is sufficient to assume guilt (after all, a lot of people do steal cars so perhaps we should just assume that anyone in a car without a registration is a car thief, right), perhaps we could simply dispense with a judge and jury and throw anyone without a proper registration in jail to serve the sentence of a car thief.

The key points you seem unable to comprehend are (A) intent (which is why we differentiate murder from manslaughter and intentional homocides from unintentional, accidental, and justified homocides) and (B) the assumption of innocense (where the accuser has to prove guilt). You don't seem to grasp the former and seem to have no use for the latter.

86 posted on 08/21/2003 12:45:17 PM PDT by Question_Assumptions
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To: Bush2000
I didn't mean to steal your car. It was purely accidental.

There have been cases in which people have accidentally used their key to enter and, in some cases, start a car that wasn't theres. Indeed, I've even once accidentally unlocked the wrong car once (same make, model, and color as mine, but it didn't have my stuff in the console); when I noticed my stuff wasn't in the console I figured out it was the wrong car, got out, and used my key to relock it.

If someone is driving a stolen car, odds are a claim that it's "accidental" is apt to be met with some skepticism. If, however, there are facts to back up the claim (e.g. the person in wrongful possession of the car has rightful ownership of a car of the same make, model, color, keying, and interior decoration/contents, and the latter car is in the parking lot from which the wrongfully-possessed car was taken) my impression is that such mistakes do not result in any sort of prosecution.

143 posted on 08/21/2003 5:45:50 PM PDT by supercat (TAG--you're it!)
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