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THE LAW IS A ASS for 01/08/2002
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 127
Originally written as installment # 116 and published in Comics Buyers Guide issue # 715, July 31, 1987 issue
Look up. (No I mean at the publication date.)
I wrote this column--complete with a joke that a ghost would have to sue in the county court for Eerie, Pennsylvania--sometime in the Spring of 1987. Eerie, Indiana didnt debut until September 15, 1991; almost half-a-decade later.
I just wanted the dates duly noted.
******
"The Law is a Ass"
Installment # 127
by
Bob Ingersoll
Lets talk about wings.
No, not the group Paul McCartney was in after the Beatles. Not even the classic WWI movie. To the best of my recollection, neither lend themselves to the scrutiny of this column. Instead, both comics Im going to write about happen to feature heroes with wings.
The first is Hawkman# 14. Now, Hawkmanis a title that has been conspicuously absent from this column. When Tony Isabella wrote it, he was careful to check out any even remotely legal concept, he wanted to toss in with me first. The fact that my phone number was one of the few Tonys embattled memory was able to memorize was only part of it; Tony knew Id never let him live it down, if I had an opportunity to analyze one of his stories in this column.
But Hawkman finally appears here, and with not one but two items on the agenda. So, One from Column A: Lorrain Frazier has been murdered. Who is she? Some character introduced into Hawkman so she could be killed and thereby advance the plot by allowing our heroes to investigate her murder. While investigating said murder, Hawkman and Hawkwoman, our heroes, break into the office of a Mr. Brundage to find out what he knows about it. They do it in typical super-hero style by smashing through the window with nary a worry about what the flying shards of glass are likely to do to them or the people in the room theyre entering. (Union rules dont you know?) And when they do it Hawkman is holding a big metal club, while Hawkwoman sports a shield.
As soon as they enter the room, some "pistol-packing mama" employee of Brundages opens fire with a .45. So, while Hawkman takes on Brundage, his bodygyard, like an idiot, shoots at Hawkwoman. Remember Hawkman had the club, and Hawkwoman had the shield. I mean, theres Hawkman roughing up Brundage and leaving himself wide open with nothing but his Honor Wings to protect his otherwise vulnerable head, and this numbnutz shoots at the lady sporting the shield! I dont care how hard it is to find good help nowadays, things cant be that bad. Anyway, while the lady shoots, she says, "They're just a couple of trespassers--and we're within our rights to fend then off with deadly force if necessary!
Sorry, lady, but it ain't that easy!
Deadly force can be used to defend oneself against a trespasser, when the trespasser has made some kind of a forced entry into one's home or place of business, and when the defender has reasonable cause to believe that the trespasser is going to cause him or her serious physical harm or is going to commit a felony. But all of these conditions must exist. If they do not, then deadly force is not justified. Much as we might like to, we can't use deadly force against the Avon Lady.
One of the classic cases everyone learns in law school is about the man who set up a spring gun to protect his property. A spring gun, is a shotgun which is mounted facing the door and with a spring attached to the trigger, so that whenever anyone opens the door, the spring pulls the trigger and the trespasser is shot. Courts have uniformly ruled the use of spring guns is not a proper exercise of deadly force, because the mechanism cannot exercise any discretion. It can't know when it is or is not appropriate to shoot.
The moral of the case is that the use of deadly force to fend off trespassers is not always justified. True, it was fine in the story in question, because the Hawks did make a forcible entry and Brundage did have reasonable grounds to fear some physical harm. It's just that the way the passage was written made it seem like deadly force was always justified against trespassers, and I wanted to make sure that everyone realized it is not.
I'd hate to think that someone took an Uzi to the neighbor's kid for tramping through the prize azaleas, just because I didn't write a simple column clarifying the matter.
One from Column B: later in the same issue of Hawkman, we learn that Mr. Brundage and Frank Delmore were once partners in the speakeasy business together. (Truth to tell, however, Brundage didn't look near old enough to have run a speakeasy, a profession which would put him in his eighties now.) Brundage and Delmore signed a partnership contract splitting everything fifty- fifty. Well, Brundage got a little greedy. He didn't want fifty-fifty. He didn't even want sixty-forty. So, he killed Delmore, allowing him to split everything one hundred-zero. Now, it seems that Delmore's ghost is haunting Brundage and the old contract is missing. Brundage was afraid that the ghost would find the contract and use it to force Brundage to split all of his holdings fifty-fifty, and then the ghost would use his leverage to force Brundage out of the picture completely. Brundage hired Ms. Fraizer to find the old contract and destroy it, so that the ghost couldn't use it to force his way back in.
Right away the pinball machine inside my head went TILT!
First we have the interesting concept of partners in the speakeasy business signing a partnership contract, which leaves one asking the natural question: what is done in case of a breach of the contract? For those of you too young to drink, thus to young to remember either Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, the classic TV series The Untouchables or even the sick class Brian De Palma movie based on the aforementioned TV series (and if you want to see how sick a class, come back next week) a short history lesson. During the 1920s, Prohibition was in full force and it was illegal to sell liquor. Because most people still wanted to drink, entrepreneurs set up speakeasies, which were secret bars, where people went to buy and drink liquor illegally. Which brings me back to the question at hand, what is done in case of a breach of a partnership deal for running a speakeasy?
One usually enforces a contract by suing the breaching party in court. Just what was the one partner in a speakeasy going to do, if the other in the speak breached their partnership contract; file suit and demand his share of the profits from an illegal gin joint? That would have made for a fun trial. Even The Touchables could have found and arrested that band of bootleggerst.
No, obviously the speak owner's not going to do that, and for good reason. It's a basic principle of law, that you can't make a contract to do an illegal thing--such as run a speakeasy. And you can't go to court to enforce a contract you couldn't make in the first place.
But even if one could go to court to enforce a contract for an illegal purpose, this story still left us with the even more interesting concept of a man worrying that a ghost needs a contract to enforce a sixty-year old partnership agreement. As I said two paragraphs ago, the way the non-breaching party enforces a contract against the breaching party is by a breach of contract law suit in court. Just what court did Brundage think was going so caught up in the spirit of the law as to entertain a lawsuit filed by a ghost? Certainly not The People's Court. Maybe the ghost was going to file in the county court for Eerie, Pennsylvania.
If a ghost is going to enforce an old partnership agreement, why would it need physical possession of the contract to do it? Why wouldn't it get it's way by using all those haunting tricks that comic book ghosts always use?
Maybe the third part of this story will answer all of these questions. I certainly hope so. I'd hate to think that nobody thought the story through any better than this.
******
Frank Ladd of Princton, Kentucky wrote me a letter asking me about another famous winged comic book character, the Angel and his actions in X-Factor # 15, when he apparently committed suicide and left his estate in a new will he drafted shortly before said suicide. Specifically, he wanted to know how Angel could have changed his will, when an issue or so earlier the hospital went to court and had him declared incompetent, so that it could amputate his gangrenous wings even though he refused to allow said operation. Don't people have to be competent in order to write a will or to change a pre-existing will?
Yes, Frank, they do have to be competent. So why was Angel's will probated?
Well the simple explanation is that no one contested the will. If no one went to court to fight its terms, then the court wouldn't have any reason to invalidate it because of the testator's possible incompetency. There would be no case or controversy in front of the court, which is a prerequisite of it's acting in some capacity.
But what if there were a will contest? What if, say, Angel's parents wanted to keep the money all in the family and fought the will. What then? Well, it is possible that the court only declared Angel incompetent as to the matter of his refusal to permit the hospital to amputate his wings; that's all the hospital was seeking when they took Angel to court. Maybe, the court ruled that Angel was so, you should pardon the expression, attached to his wings, emotionally, that he could not make a rational decision over whether they should be amputated. But in every other aspect, he would be competent. In that case, the court never declared him incompetent to write or change his will.
Would you believe it doesn't matter, because Angel blew his entire fortune on Donkey Kong?
Frank also wanted to know if the fact that it appears that Angel committed suicide would have any affect on his will. No. The suicide of a testator does not affect the validity of his will. At least, not in the same way that suicide can sometimes invalidate the death benefit of an insurance policy. The wills of suicides are perfectly legal and binding. However, if someone were going to contest the new will by claiming that Angel wasn't competent when he wrote it, he could try to use the fact that Angel was contemplating suicide when he wrote his new will as circumstantial proof of Angel's incompetent state of mind at the time of he drafted the will.
Actually, the entire question is academic; Angel isn't really dead. Aw come on! Don't tell me I spoiled the surprise. Even if you didn't know that Angel was going to be Death of the Four Horsemen, I still didn't blow the surprise. This is comics, remember? Nobody dies in comics. Even the Marvel characters know are dead, like Bucky Barnes, have more return engagements than Bob Hope at Christmas time.
Bob Ingersoll
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