If You Trash It, Make Sure You Own It

Can you vandalize your own car?

That may sound like a silly, hypothetical legal question that would never need answering, but an appellate court had to answer it late last year. Honest.

A Kern County woman, Karla Kahanic, was accused of vandalism because she threw a beer bottle at her own car, a Mercedes Benz. Well, actually it is a bit misleading to say it was her own car. It was owned by her and her husband. At the time, they were getting a divorce, but the car was still considered community property owned equally by both spouses.

Broke the Window

She threw the bottle into the rear window after she spotted the car parked near the residence of another woman her husband was visiting.

The state Penal Code says: “every person who maliciously . . . damages or destroys any real or personal property not his own is guilty of vandalism.”

The legal analysis focused on the three words not his own. The court of appeal went to great lengths to analyze the Penal Code provision, even to the point of searching for the following convoluted legal definition of the word own:

“Following the possessive, usually of a possessive pronoun, it (own) is used as an intensive to express ownership, interest or individual peculiarity with emphasis, or to indicate the exclusion of others.”

After a thorough review of what it described as a “marital misadventure,” the court concluded: “Each community property owner has an equal ownership interest and, although undivided, one which the criminal law protects from unilateral nonconsensual damage or destruction by the other marital partner.”

I might have said it more simply. If the woman was throwing a beer bottle at only her own car, she could not be convicted of vandalism. But because her husband also had an ownership interest in the car, her crime was against the property of another, not her own property. And the conviction stands. (By the way, she was given probation.)

There must be a message here, somewhere. Don’t throw bottles at your family car. Nah, that couldn’t be it.

Legal Brief

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