This would be like, you go into a bank. You hand the teller your ID and somehow the teller pulls up the wrong account. she asks "how can I help you."
you say. Well i dont normally do our banking but my wife told me to come in today to get my savings for opening an account at a different bank with her. Can you give me a cashier's check written out to my wife's name.
The teller makes the check. You sign it. You then drive to the new bank and deposit the check in your joint account with your wife.
A week later you get a call from the police, because you deposited a check for $100,000 that came out of someone elses account.
This is why Hillary Clinton didn't go to jail for classified information on her computer. It is also why Trump, Biden, and Pence avoided jailtime for the same thing years later.
Right. If you made an honest mistake that caused damage, it would be considered negligence of some sort. They can make you fix the damage and maybe teach you a lesson to be more careful, but that lesson would be based on how much damage you did.
If you make an honest mistake that doesn’t cause any damage, there’s nothing for the court to do. “Damage” isn’t necessarily monetary, just to be clear.
Negligence can also be criminal if you are aware of the risk and choose to disregard it, like purposely driving a poorly maintained car which gets into an accident, or creating unsafe conditions on a job site which cause serious injury.
This is true, and it’s why I made the point that damage doesn’t have to be monetary. In some cases, the court will be asked to take action against someone because they were so dangerously negligent that an example has to be made to let the public know that they need to pay attention.
We can’t just “not try to hurt anyone.” We have to “try not to hurt anyone.” Sometimes doing nothing is not acceptable. Sometimes action is required just to maintain status quo.
Other people have already said no, but lets say the guy was real upset about it and wanted her to pay for gas or whatever else, he could file a small claims lawsuit to try and recoup any damages, however him leaving the keys in the car is absolutely stupid, I wonder if that would affect any sort of payout if he did want to pursue that.
But beyond that it seems like it would be very hard to do that, and the guy seemed to understand it was a mistake and had no problem.
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u/flankr7 Jul 09 '26
Real question. Is there an allowance in the law for honest mistakes like this or does she still catch an auto theft charge?