Does your gut sense allows that if your bag get snatched , and the thug is fleeing away .You don’t ’cause may be you are lazy , incompetant, overweight blah blah .., even if you have a chance.No offence though.And the Dollar amount you mentioned may not appear that small to everyone. So where do you draw the line ? and who are you say that the guy was not a threat,sitting in front of a computer.

Imafish,
Everyone , including police officers ,do have limits but this is not a finite one and everytime the goal post is shifted on court decisions which are meddlesome, expensive , sometiimes unscientific and decided by lay juries which might not have the clues and bloody hell this disproportionately affects people whoa re most sued and get on the defendants side , and it costs a lot even to prove your innocence . Don’t you think the store owners behaved appropriately. Would you,ve done something different?

Or maybe I am the poor writer. I notice, belatedly that my post seems rude rather than witty and sarcastic. I apologize for that. Both for being rude and for not being witty.

But my point was that EVEN assuming your imagined absolute immunity, retailers would still be constrained from shooting suspected shoplifters so you conclusion, “it would only be a matter of time before my hypothetical involving a dead 8 year old comes true” would be unlike to come about.

Jb. “While there certainly is a boundary that should not be crossed in defense of one’s goods, this seems to be clearly within it.”

From the article I read, it was not clear to me. The guy claimed he was “beat up” and the judge believed it. I personally do know know what “beat up” means in this context. And even more importantly to me, was he the cause of the beating, i.e., did they have to subdue him because he initiated a fight or resisted his apprehension? I don’t know. The article is sparse.

However, while I’m of the opinion that a retailer does have the right to stop and detain criminals, it does not have any right to beat up criminals. Any punishment should be carried out by the courts.

Aniban: “Why Imagine so much , why not stick to the matters of the case . Your 8 yr old dead boy is just a red herring , to obfuscate a common sense issue . You are really thinking like a lawyer”

Actually, I was thinking like a philosopher. For example, Descartes imagined a world where nothing was certain in an attempt to determine if there was any certainty in the world. Hume imagined that there was no certainty in any judgment based on cause in effect to determine if any such judgment could be trusted. And of course Socrates/Plato would take assertions down to their fundamental nature to determine if they contained any truth.

Thus my example was not used “to obfuscate a common sense issue” but was the use of common sense to show how retailers do in fact have some limits. And from what I gather, you seem to agree that they have such limits.

You disagree with the judge in this case. As I don’t know the facts, I do not have an opinion either way. My point isn’t to say that the judge was right or wrong in this case. My point is that retailers do have limits.

While there certainly is a boundary that should not be crossed in defense of one’s goods, this seems to be clearly within it.