united-states liability police search-and-seizure
Can I booby-trap my property against police?
<p>Inspired by <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/q/3966/10">this question</a>: Suppose I'm paranoid (perhaps justifiably) that law enforcement personnel might conduct a warranted raid of my property.  So I setup booby-traps that are designed to either:</p>
<p>A. Destroy any evidence I think they might look for, or, more extremely,</p>
<p>B. Destroy the property <em>and anyone on it</em> in the event that it is raided.</p>
<p>We know from <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/a/3392/10">here</a> and <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/a/968/10">here</a> that I owe trespassers some duty of care.  Being an (otherwise) law-abiding citizen, I post explicit warnings within the perimeter of my property, which I have secured against trespass by anybody but a very determined attacker.  I.e., the only way the police could see the warnings is if they have entered for a raid, at which point the warnings state, &quot;If you go any further into this property you will trigger devices that will destroy the property and kill all persons therein.&quot;</p>

<p>Sure enough, the police get a no-knock search warrant, breach the outer perimeter, and stop at the warnings.  At this point can I be compelled by a court to grant safe access for law enforcement to carry out the search warrant?</p>
<p>And if, despite the clear warning, the police decide to press on with their search and an officer is injured or killed, can I be held criminally or civilly liable for that casualty?</p>
<hr />
<p>Notes &amp; clarifications from comments:</p>
<ul>
<li>I'm revealing my <em>mens rea</em> in this question, but objectively I have merely secured the property and warned determined trespassers. The police can lawfully search, but do I have a <em>duty to make my premises safe to search</em>? Am I <em>ex ante</em> liable for their injuries, given the suitable warning? Or can they say, &quot;If you don't make it safe to search, you're liable for our injuries?&quot; At which point haven't they compelled me to incriminate myself, meaning that I can disarm the traps but all the premises' contents are then &quot;poisoned&quot; evidence?</li>
<li>Practically speaking it's not hard to rig thermite to destroy evidence without endangering anyone not in close proximity.  But then, destruction of evidence is a crime, <em>and</em> I'd rather not destroy my valuable stash of whatever. Or, again, maybe I don't have anything to hide but on principle I <em>really</em> don't want police in my house.  So part of the motivation here is to determine: can one construct a scenario that would flat-out deter the search?</li>
<li>One analogy that might illuminate this is to consider a hazmat factory: It is secured, it has warnings, and if police barge in and start tossing things without adequate protection they could be injured or killed.  So in real life – even just approaching suspected meth labs – the police bring in hazmat specialists.  They don't say, &quot;Please render your lab safe for us to search,&quot; and I don't <em>think</em> they say, &quot;We got hurt raiding your lab, so that's on you.&quot;  In this hypothetical there is no specialist they can call because the exact threat is unknown, and designed to be unknowable in advance.  In fact, <em>I could just be bluffing and not have any boobytraps</em>.</li>
<li>Another reference point that occurs to me: when police are confronted with non-trivial explosive devices, whenever possible it seems they prefer to just clear a safety perimeter and destroy the device than to try to approach and disarm it.</li>
<li>One last point of reference I came across: There is one such example in existence in the U.S.: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joe_Gray" rel="noreferrer">Fugitive John Joe Gray</a> has kept police from entering his property to arrest him for 16 years, simply because no sheriff has considered it worth the risk.</li>
</ul>

<p>First off, you cannot booby trap your property, period. It is both illegal and tortious. But, as you noted, there are already questions/answers that deal with this issue.</p>

<p>Sure enough, if the police get a no-knock search warrant, that in and of itself is the Court order allowing entry by any means necessary. When the officers, there by right of law, breach the outer perimeter and stop at the warnings, <strong>they will not be seeking any <em>other</em> court orders</strong> to have you <em>allow</em> them "safe entry". Their warrant gives them all the right they need, as probable cause of crime and violent intent or intent to destroy evidence was already presented to a judge. If, in real life, you actually put up signage or state explicitly that they're being forewarned that you intend to harm, trap, maim, or otherwise make it unsafe to enter; or that doing so will result in an attempt to destroy evidence, that is something they have already assumed (hence the seeking and granting of the no-knock vs. a regular search warrant). However, the signs in and of themselves are not protected speech, but rather overt threats, and that would put you in a very precarious position indeed. </p>

<p>If the police get a "no knock" warrant (the most invasive, difficult to get warrants, whereby there is a grave risk of destruction of evidence or injury to persons), the police will ensure they have safe passage &ndash; they've come prepared for dangerous entry long before your signs, but once they see them, you could rest assured they will take them as they are intended: as a <strong><em>direct threat to their safety</em></strong>, and they will deploy a SWAT or other heavily armed entry team (who is usually there anyway for these dangerous entries). You could expect things like smoke/out canister and teargas, flash bangs, and heavily armed and well armored officers attempting to force you from your dwelling. Presumably, if you need to disarm traps to escape the situation, they can enter.  Assuming you're home when they invade with chemical weapons, whether you come out or not, they will force you to disarm whatever booby trapping you may have in place that may destroy evidence, likely walking you in as their human shield in the event you're lying about any dangerous ones. That is probably your best case scenario. They may just decide to throw you through the perimeter once they get their hands on you, just to see what happens!</p>

<p>If you don't exit and are home or if you are lucky enough to be out, the bomb squad, ATF, and SWAT will converge on your property in less than typical means. Because from your warning they can assume some incendiary or explosive device exists, bringing it into the jurisdiction of other agencies. If they cannot disarm the trap, they would send a robot in first to set it off, or cut through your roof, or knock down a wall &ndash; whatever it takes to get in without using a typical means of ingress/egress, so as not to chance your trap. Regardless, you can rest assured that they will get in, and you will pay for the trap you set for law enforcement. Further, to whatever charges you'd have been faced with from evidence flowing from the original warrant will now be added additional charges like attempted murder of a peace officer; if you have any roommates or known associates: conspiracy to do those things; attempted destruction of evidence, criminal interference with a police investigation ... all at a minimum. If anyone is <em>actually</em> harmed, your signage offers you no shield from criminal or tort liability, and you will be lucky to live through the experience once they get their hands on you. Police tend to not like being the targets of intentional maiming, dismemberment or death. </p>

<p>You have to understand that, according to this hypothetical, you are intentionally trying to harm law enforcement, or destroy evidence of your dangerous criminal activity. These are not invaders, or intruders according to the law; they are the people whose job it is to enforce the laws, collect the evidence (if you weren't getting arrested pursuant to the fruits of the warrant, you certainly would be at that point). The signs themselves would make excellent exhibits in the coming case of <em>State v. you</em>.</p>

<p>BTW: The only reason they have left John Joe Gray alone is that he knows the Henderson County Sheriff Ronny Brownlow, who has been told that the ATF, FBI, and State SWAT, would all be happy to enter and get or kill Mr. Gray if need be. Since the Sheriff never filed any federal charges, and has determined that he doesn't want to breach (and it's in his jurisdiction to determine this), the Sheriff, aware that Gray's entire family is holed up in the "compound", decided it's not worth going in. It's as well known as it is anomalous. When the police want in, and have the right to get in, they will get in. That Sheriff just decided it's not worthwhile.</p>

<p><em>...the police decide to press on with their search and an officer is injured or killed, can I be held criminally or civilly liable for that casualty?</em></p>

<p>I didn't read through all of your links so I'll just say - generally speaking you cannot use deadly force to protect unoccupied property, the law finds it neither justified nor reasonable. </p>

<p>Katko v. Briney, 183 N.W.2d 657 (Iowa 1971) is a pretty famous case where a guy set a spring gun on some abandoned property. The device was a shotgun set to fire at the legs of a trespasser. It worked. Trespasser sued landowning spring-gunner and won. Iowa Supreme Court said that landowner would've been justified using the shotgun himself if he had been home.</p>

<p>So there you go - traps lead to civil suits.</p>

<p>Now, if you're Fred from Scooby Doo and you just like setting fun traps on your own private property, you use all sorts of signage to warn people, and someone dies on your punji stick trampoline I don't really know what result. But in your facts the dangers you've created are intentional and serve no reasonable purpose. You are wanton and reckless and display 100% disregard of the safety of others.  The willful and intentional wrong is not going to play in certain jurisdictions where common law is friendly to trespassers.</p>

<p>Regarding the crime stuff, I'm assuming the cops have you already because your facts offer a court order as an option. What they do when they get to the signs is send in a robot to either gather evidence or set off the deadly traps. Either way you're going to jail. </p>

<p>People have covered the harm-to-people booby trapping at length, and that one's pretty straightforward anyway.  I'm going to focus on another area:</p>
<h2>Destruction of documents</h2>
<p>I worked for a Big-Data firm when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act landed.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So I setup booby-traps that are designed to either:</p>
<p>A. Destroy any evidence I think they might look for,</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What they're going to look for here is <em>why</em> you are destroying the data.  If you set it up <strong>for the purpose of</strong> keeping it away from law enforcement, that is <em>prima facie</em> illegal, you are correct.  And this is the dilemma faced by corporations as Sarbanes-Oxley passed.  <strong>But what if you destroy data for another purpose?</strong></p>
<p>The answer is, yes, that is allowed – but it must <em>look, walk and quack</em> like a reasonable, legitimate purpose that isn't just a sham to cause the side-effect of denying it to law enforcement.</p>
<h2>An example: Time-aged deletion</h2>
<p>For instance the FBI grabs my computer and says, &quot;Oooh, you deleted your browser history!&quot; And then I say, &quot;Look in my crontab.&quot;  They find a perl script that goes through the library/registry and deletes all browser history.  There's that smoking gun!  Gotcha!  <em><strong>Oh, wait.</strong></em> The script was created in 2004, last modified in 2015, and is flagged to run <em>nightly</em>. The last change to the crontab file is 17 months ago. Other browser settings are set to delete or not store cookies, and those config files have a last-change date 5 months ago.   <em>That paints a completely different picture: of ordinary privacy best-practices to override the default (promiscuous) behavior of browsers, and this person did not change those habits lately.  This has nothing to do with the police investigation</em>.</p>
<p>That is exactly what corporations figured out after contemplating the meaning of Sarbanes-Oxley.  They realized that <em>if</em> you had a parade of people in FBI jackets hauling Bankers Boxes out of your building, it <em>did not help your case</em> if some of those boxes were labeled 1974, where now they're searching for misdeeds of three managements prior to yours.  This is where <strong>data retention policies</strong> entered the picture.  If you burned all files prior to 2014 <em>as the FBI was pulling up</em>, that was a felony. But if you had a policy to <em>routinely</em> destroy files over 6 years old, <strong>and that policy was in place and acted upon long before any legal inquiry</strong>, then you were in the clear.</p>
<h2>Another example: event-triggered deletion</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Practically speaking it's not hard to rig thermite to destroy evidence without endangering anyone not in close proximity. But then, destruction of evidence is a crime...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So far, I've only talked about time/age.  But a <em>reasonable reason</em> for other destruction is also <em>routine</em> non-police threats.   Say you have a significant hoard of Bitcoins (that is, strings of cryptographic data that act like money to the first person who uses it). Your master store is on a laptop, in a safe, in a cave, <del>on the moon</del> at a secure Iron Mountain facility <em>that happens to be</em> in a non-extradition state.</p>
<p>However you keep <em>your daily working copy</em> on a thumb drive in a self-destruct-rigged fire safe – an electrical signal destroys it safely.  You have this rigged to destroy on <em>any</em> intrusion, and documents outside the safe show that you have made an (accurate) risk assessment that you're a target for thieves who may know you have a lot of Bitcoin, and the trap is clearly focused on intruders. <strong>The police set it off by accident</strong>.  Again you are in the clear for &quot;document destruction&quot;, since you can show you didn't destroy it to evade authorities, you destroyed it to deny it to thieves and thus retain control of your Bitcoin.</p>
<h2>They'll still charge you (why not?) but you'll easily defend</h2>
<p>Naturally, the police investigators will only think about themselves.  They will assume correlation is causality, and &quot;You rigged it to destroy <em>because you saw us coming</em>&quot;.  You will point out that the protection systems are <em>years</em> old, and they will retort that you saw them coming years ago <em>because</em> that's when you planned to commit crimes.</p>
<p>This is where you defend that your defenses are perfectly reasonable for a law-abiding citizen in your position. That's easy for the corporate deletion policy; you simply explain that storing old records is unprofitable, and absent any expected litigation, why do so?</p>
<p>In the case of Bitcoin, you'd need to overcome the prosecution's propaganda that only criminals use Bitcoin and that your backup copy being in a non-extradition state means something: and show that you had perfectly ordinary and legitimate reasons to use it.</p>
<h2>The Hazmat factory</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>One analogy that might illuminate this is to consider a hazmat factory: It is secured, it has warnings, and if police barge in and start tossing things without adequate protection they could be injured or killed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's a different deal. You intersect with a bajillion safety, OSHA, UL, various Codes, permitting, licensing and inspection issues, <em>almost</em> anytime you have <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_plant" rel="noreferrer">plant</a></em> that is not inherently safe.</p>
<p>The problem is, this safety dance is a 2-part dance.  The cops have an obligation to be careful, sensible and <em>not defeat the safety protections that Code calls for</em>, i.e. if they see a &quot;Danger Confined Space&quot; sign they are expected to go find out what that means before charging in there and <a href="https://safety4sea.com/three-crewmen-die-after-enclosed-space-entry-on-cargo-ship/" rel="noreferrer">having this happen</a>.</p>
<p>But the other side of the coin is, you are obligated to make a reasonable effort to comply with Code and safety standard practices.  That sign had better be there, unless it's a hazard which <em>is obvious to anyone in the trade</em>.  If they insist on going into a ballast tank on your ship or a thing that is obviously a grain silo... well yeah, that's on them.  It's not a booby trap for obviously-dangerous things to be dangerous.</p>
<p>On the other hand, you may have less formal or unpermitted stuff – homebrew biodiesel refineries for 20 gallon batches are common enough, jury-rigged out of hot water heaters and settling tanks.  You don't need to pull a permit for a thing like that, but you should be following normal safety standards.</p>
<p>If an incident happens, it'll get treated as an industrial accident – and the liability and consequences will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.  If a cop gets shocked by wiring in your biodiesel setup, they'll go straight to the Electrical Codes: was it a goobed-up mishmash of draped wires that the officer tripped over... or had the officer on the hunt for meth, opened up an obvious electrical box and found exactly what it says on the tin, which was nothing, but in electrical, &quot;nothing&quot; means &quot;up to 600V.&quot;</p>
<h2>Act like a desperado, get treated like one.</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>[to the meth lab] They don't say, &quot;Please render your lab safe for us to search,&quot; and I don't think they say, &quot;We got hurt raiding your lab, so that's on you.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The second one, I cover above.  <em>the vast, vast  majority</em> of meth labs are hinkle-dinkle safety fiascoes, where the lab is mortally dangerous <strong>to the operator</strong> nevermind the police.  In that case, yeah, the operator is liable for any casualty.</p>
<p>But the cops raiding <a href="https://breakingbad.fandom.com/wiki/Gustavo_Fring" rel="noreferrer">Gus Fring's</a> lab would know to expect a tip-top, button-up operation where there might be booby traps, but at least the lab equipment isn't going to kill them.  <strong>Let's think about that reputation thing</strong>.</p>
<p>Obviously in a nuclear power plant, they don't give licenses to cheeseheads. Cops can expect on-site security to act lawfully, and that any resistance to their demands will be reasonable and appropriate for the safety of community, plant, workers and police.  So when they ask to see the reactor core, security contacts the control room, the control room says &quot;unable&quot; and security explains the danger, and everyone treats that as reasonable. If special access arrangements need to be made, the police, power grid operators and plant management have a sit-down and figure out how to approach that safely without blacking out 5 states or irradiating 3 counties.  <strong>That is possible when you have actors with a reputation for reasonability</strong>.</p>
<p>Contrast with the lone wing-nut you mentioned, who is <em>merely presumed</em> to have set all manner of booby traps, and the sheriff presumes a raid will result in casualty.  <strong>That person's reputation didn't get that way <em>on its own</em></strong>.</p>
<p>The hypothetical &quot;you&quot; in this question is cavalier and indifferent about intent to maim on purpose.  Assuming that &quot;your&quot; public mannerisms are comparable,  you will also be casting a similar reputation.  And that will cause police to act accordingly.</p>

<blockquote>
  <h1>2010 Arkansas Code</h1>
  
  <h1>Title 5 - Criminal Offenses</h1>
  
  <h1>Subtitle 6 - Offenses Against Public Health, Safety, Or Welfare</h1>
  
  <h1>Chapter 73 - Weapons</h1>
  
  <h1>Subchapter 1 - Possession and Use Generally</h1>
  
  <h1>§ 5-73-126 - Booby traps.</h1>
  
  <p><strong>5-73-126. Booby traps.</strong></p>
  
  <p><strong>(a)</strong> It is unlawful for any person to install or maintain a booby trap upon his or her own property or any other person's property.</p>
  
  <p><strong>(b</strong> As used in this section, "booby trap" means a device designed to cause death or serious physical injury to a person.</p>
  
  <p><strong>(c)</strong> Any person who pleads guilty or nolo contendere or who is found guilty of violating this section is guilty of a Class D felony. </p>
  
  <p>– <a href="https://law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/2010/title-5/subtitle-6/chapter-73/subchapter-1/5-73-126/" rel="noreferrer">law.justia.com</a></p>
</blockquote>

<p>Doing anything to inhibit a lawful police investigation is considered obstruction of justice and is a crime. If you know you are under arrest, I imagine they can then have you charged with eluding police or resisting arrest.</p>

<p>You can legally booby-trap your property as long as those booby-traps don't hurt anybody. An example would be a sensor that detected your door being broke down that ignites an incendiary device inside of a fire proof safe. To protect your computers, use magnesium strips. It burns very hot, but doesn't explode. Gun powder in small amounts that has space around it to flare up, burns very hot, but doesn't explode. For drugs, build something where they somehow get flushed down the toilet if the bathroom door is forced open without unlocking it. You need to make sure that 1. Nobody gets hurt. 2. Any illegal evidence is 100% destroyed. No residue. 3. Don't discuss the booby-trap with anybody. Think small and unobtrusive so nobody knows your booby-trap went off. Please don't think about revenge. Concentrate on saving your butt. I'm posting this answer hoping to save the lives of innocent police officers just doing their jobs.  Can't we all just get along? Stop the violence. Peace out. :)</p>
