Well, you are changing the rules on us here.  I have nothing against the idea that somebody who believes they have been wronged should have the right to publicly confront the person who they believe has wronged them.  

Attacking them in a hotel room with guns, and holding them against their will is another matter entirely.

Attacking them in a hotel room with guns, and holding them against their will is another matter entirely

You should be held accountable for breaking whatever laws you break, whether or not your are retrieving your own property.

And what if you thought you saw your bike, and accosted the person riding it, and then it turned out not to be yours?  Or it turned out that your wife sold the bike to this person but didn't tell you about it?  There are very good reasons to try to go through official channels first before showing up with a gun - if nothing else, it drastically reduces the risk of a misunderstanding.

Were I to see someone with them...I would want to confront the thief directly

The person with your property is not necessarily the thief. A response of, "Bugger off. I bought these on Ebay and I can prove it," would sort of complicate your claim, wouldn't it?

Sure it would. But thats the point - I get to make and stake my claim.

I don't need a thirty party (mom, teacher, police man) to run to and make the suspected thief give me back my toys.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

That's never been a valid defense for receiving stolen property, has it? You'd be legally obliged to return it, though I suppose it would take more than mere say-so.

"Hey, is that my money in your wallet?"

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

I think you're missing the point here.  I don't believe anything I posted was indicative of saying to you, "you have no right to confront someone you believe stole your property."  Once again, where's the evidence that this is what OJ did?  Where is the evidence that he went into the hotel room without weaponry and asserted his rights of ownership?  Where's the evidence that he tried to use the law to settle his differences?  When he and his accomplice entered the hotel rooms with guns and brandished them in an attempt to take back his property, he broke the law and he deserves to be punished.  To say otherwise seems bizarre to me.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Personally, Beardsley's testimony was enough to convince me that not enough of the facts were actually present to find any conviction. I'd have to deny the assumed "facts" that OJ just went in somewhere with guns drawn and wouldn't let people leave. You've got Nixonian gaps in the tapes that were presented as evidence. As a juror, I'd have had a hard time not laughing the prosecution out of the courtroom. The trial was a farce. As much as a farce of his criminal murder trial? Well, I suppose that's up to one's view on irony. I think OJ did have the right to go into that hotel room and remove his things. The guns and the kidnapping--I wasn't on the jury and can't say those facts have been proven to me in the court of public opinion.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

I am interested in how you would write a law to accommodate Mr. Simpson's behavior as legal.  Perhaps you could take a stab at it here.  Or are you just indicating your support of jury nullification.

Despite it being more common to have a police officer do it for you, in order to avoid charges of false arrest, a citizen's arrest by force is legal in all 50 states.  The two dealers were caught in the act of knowingly selling stolen property, which is a crime eligible for a citizens arrest.  The fact that there were other ways of handling the situation in no way obligated O.J. to use them.  In fact, since his calls to the police asking for assistance were blown off by the police, he really had no other way to get these people arrested.

Let's suppose you are being kidnapped or robbed by someone.  They turn to you and ask if you want them to call the police.  What person who truly believed that they were being kidnapped or robbed would say, "no"?   Doesn't O.J.'s willingness to let the police sort out the situation indicate that the true situation was neither a kidnapping nor a robbery?

This wouldn't have happened if Johnny Cochran were still alive.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

When citizens act as if they are police officers, by enforcing the law themselves rather than leaving that to actual police, they are either being public-spirited citizens fulfilling their civic duty, or they are vigilantes, typically reinterpreting the law for their own purposes and committing terrible injustices.  The whole citizen's arrest thing is a bit of a Pandora's box.  There are times when it is appropriate, but many more times when it is not.

Suppose O.J. tries to make a citizen's arrest of people who have his memorabilia, on the grounds that they are thieves, and they in turn try to arrest him as a thief, since they believe that they are the legal owners of the memorabilia in question.  Then they can have a wild-west style shoot-out.  Whoever is a better and faster shot wins.  This is not an ideal model for resolving legal disputes.  If it were to become too popular, we would all wind up having to carry loaded guns at all times, in case we were going to be subjected to false arrest by some vigilante.

The whole reason why we have a police force is so that potentially violent confrontations can be handled by people who have the training and discipline necessary to do so in a way that upholds our social ideals of justice, rather than turning those confrontations into an exercise in might makes right.  We give this up at our peril.

And purely aside from that I really don't like O.J. Simpson.

The idea that a police officer has more "rights" in enforcing the law is a fallacy. All individuals have the same rights and social responsibilities in enforcing the law. I would merely point to the case of the New Jersey governor, Corzine. He was not issued a ticket by officers for failing to wear a safety belt when he was in an auto accident recently. A private citizen went to court and filed a valid ticket to which Corzine had to respond. Certainly, both cop and layman are subject to accusations and remunerations for false arrest or other missteps in the face of the law. To conduct a citizen's arrest, you must follow the same procedures and meet the same burdens as an officer would. But to contradict these basic tenets is to cede the very foundations of a free and fair society.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

If it is true that all citizens, whether they are members of a police force or not, have exactly the same rights and responsibilities for the enforcement of the law, then why do we even bother to hire police?    We are all police, in effect.  (This gives a new meaning to "police state".)

I'm not sure how it works in every area, but I was under the impression that citizens can't arrest people for minor crimes or events that occur outside their presence.

I thought the point behind a citizens arrest was that you could stop a mugger from beating up his victim or hold a robber at gunpoint until the police arrive, not to make each and every one of us our own branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

In that case, they can have a standoff, and call the police and have the police take both groups to court to have the court decide what to do.  The police aren't supposed to be judge and jury either.

So even if you are trying to make a citizen's arrest you might still need the police to come and make a more official type of arrest, particularly if the person you are trying to arrest is as well armed (or better armed) than you are.

And could you also charge someone with resisting arrest if they gave you trouble when you tried to make a citizen's arrest?  And if two people are both trying to arrest each other, and both resist, are they both guilty?  And if you shoot someone while he is trying to escape from a citizen's arrest, is that also legal?

For the answers to these and many more exciting questions, watch "The Young And The Arrestless".

Not even the cops can shoot someone if they try to escape from being arrested unless they pose a direct threat in which case anyone with a legal fire arm can do the same in most states. Of course you need the police to complete the booking and jailing process.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

As long as the police are going to have to get involved anyway, it would seem that O.J. Simpson would have done better to just call the police in the first place, rather than trying to seize the memorabilia by force, or even (as he might have done) trying to make a citizen's arrest.

And while it is true that you can't just shoot people unless they pose a direct threat, I'm sure that there are many situations in which opinions differ concerning the degree or directness of the threat which a given person presents.

Hey, if you wanna take your chances with a jury of your peers, be my guest :-)

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

joshv,
As you suspect, I'm indicating my support for jury nullification.

That said - just like in defamation where truth is a defense, you shouldn't be able to be convicted for armed robbery if the stuff in question is provably yours.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

I see - you believe that individuals should be able to substitute their own judgment in place of the law.  All individuals?  You trust everyone's judgment?

You might look to relatively recent US history for some very sinister examples of jury nullification that I cannot imagine you would support.  It used to be mighty hard to get a conviction in for lynchings in the south.

I see - you believe that individuals should be able to substitute their own judgment in place of the law.  All individuals?  You trust everyone's judgment?

Nah - I trust juries use their judgement in place of the law. The law is a good framework for regular everyday interaction, but I am skeptical of the 'feed input of facts in, get sentence out' approach to justice. Whats that old saw? better the guilty go free than the innocent be imprisoned.

The law as a framework is not perfect, human potential behavior is always going to be greater than its capacity to codify. As a result I favor a few checks on the application of the law itself.

Can that be abused? Certainly -- just like the law can be abused. Its my belief however that its a lot easier to change the culture so as to apply the law fairly, than it is to change the law to meet the needs of the culture.*

* As proof I offer the hundreds if not thousands of little laws rarely enforced that are still on the books in many jurisdictions.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

Having served on juries, I'm less than ready to replace the framework of laws for the considered judgments of 12 people randomly selected from the general population.  There is no entrance requirement to serve on a jury, basically it's simply registering to vote in most jurisdictions.  And most people answer the call for jury duty hoping they don't get selected for a trial (unless they're either legal junkies or just plain bored in their regular lives).  Most of the people who show up for jury duty don't have any real insight into the issues they're going to be called upon to cast judgment on; they learn all about it along the way of the trial and the judge's instructions.  And the judge is the one who charges the jury with the appropriate law that's at issue in a trial.

One of the panels I served on, we had a juror who promptly fell asleep during the trial.  He was dismissed after being scolded by the judge.  But, was he any less attentive than the guy who replaced him who asked me how I was voting and why over lunch in the cafeteria before the trial had even ended?  Or did he do any less disservice to justice than one of the women who showed up in the jury room insisting she was bored and had better things to do than sit through this crap?  In between whines, she cast her vote for the defendant despite her obvious lack of knowledge of any the facts argued in court.

I think when you say you trust juries to know better than the law what the law ought to be, you're saying you trust juries composed of people exactly like you.  Unfortunately, it's damnably hard to find those 11 other soulmates for you to mull over the fate of someone.  Finally, even though there is this notion of jury nullification (which I believe to be the most extreme exception to the rule in most courts) there is also a case where a judge may overrule a jury's decision because it's patently obvious their decision was ill-formed and not in conformance with the law.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

MayorB - you make a lot of valid anecdotal points and I freely concede that the way that jurys are selected has its flaws.

However, Confucius was said to have said, never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.

There are hundreds of variation across different cultures and religions of the 'golden rule' because at its core, its a workable (though flawed) social framework for humans. It has its flaws - but in a jury situation it works as a pretty darn good guiding rod.

I can't see myself sending OJ to jail for what he did because were I in his place, I wouldn't think its just to be likewise convicted for those particular actions. Thats pretty much the entirety of my perspective.

Now if you are saying to yourself 'I wouldn't have done what OJ did, or if I did, I'd deserve to go to jail', then we don't really disagree per se...but my hope is that there is at least one of me for every 11 of you.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

"Nah - I trust juries use their judgement in place of the law. "

I've given you an example (which you ignored) where juries could not be trusted to use their judgment in place of the law.  In the south, not so long ago, it was quite common to find 12 (white) individuals who thought that killing a black man was perfectly justifiable in many circumstances, circumstances that were most definitely not recognized by law under the definition of "justifiable homicide".

josh,
Apologies -- certainly I didn't meant to ignore you point. I thought I had addressed it by saying that there are flaws in the jury system. Certainly if you don't select a jury 'of your peers' -- i.e. if only a specific portion of the population is represented in a case, the interests of justice is unlikely to be served well.

That said, the issue of southern juries (and judges) tipping the scales against black people is peripheral to jury nullification and was (mostly) solved through the use of the civil rights act to bring federal charges into play.

I think where we disagree is that you distrust people more than you distrust the law. Whereas I, like Anatole France, recognize that the law even when applied fairly can nevertheless be unjust.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

This was not so much a problem with juries themselves but one cultivated by a prosecutorial system in which judges were complicit in not allowing blacks to serve on juries. It is the responsibility of the justice system to ensure fair juries in the first place.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

You might be pleased to know that you are in good company. Governor Palin also supports jury nullification. Seems the far right is pretty fond of the concept.  Do you trust those folks too?

Well its no secret that libertarians (who as you know I lean towards) and some aspects of the far-right have philosophies in company. Sarah Palin leans libertarian like I do, so its no surprise to me that she would favor jury nullification. I don't object to Palin as VP for her philosophy, I object to her for her inexperience.

Was McCain 8 years younger, I'd have no problem with the republican ticket. Libertarian or not, I just don't think Palin is ready to be president, and on that basis don't think she should be VP.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.