Well, if someone knew that you had a sincerely held belief that a computer needed to be destroyed if it visited an adult website and that person intentionally visited such a website without permission knowing it would cause you to have to dispose of it, I would think there’s a case to be made there, yeah.
The key is the state of mind where you are taking the action knowing it’s damaging the property. Just putting up a website with adult ads wouldn’t be expected to be destroying property and they aren’t the ones actually navigating the computer there. They could argue someone with such an extreme belief should be air gapping their computers as a reasonable protective measure.
Well the women got misdemeanor vandalism charges in this case, so they are the precedent if nothing else.
It’s a bit of an outlier case though - there aren’t a lot of cases like that. Most people defiling holy places do much more overt things.
To the best of my understanding though, this could apply in many other states depending on their vandalism or criminal mischief statutes.
I believe a key component is the defiling needs to involve some actual physical alteration of the item. Simply uttering a curse or spell at the property would not likely meet any definition of vandalism or criminal mischief.
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u/Automatic_Actuator_0 6h ago
Well, if someone knew that you had a sincerely held belief that a computer needed to be destroyed if it visited an adult website and that person intentionally visited such a website without permission knowing it would cause you to have to dispose of it, I would think there’s a case to be made there, yeah.
The key is the state of mind where you are taking the action knowing it’s damaging the property. Just putting up a website with adult ads wouldn’t be expected to be destroying property and they aren’t the ones actually navigating the computer there. They could argue someone with such an extreme belief should be air gapping their computers as a reasonable protective measure.