Assault and Battery

Recently on social media and even professional established journalist opinion pieces, there was a perturbation about a football play that raised a dire. From the video replays it seems two (or many) big guys bumping into each other went above and beyond the accepted rules of doing such mayhem. One player tore the helmet off another player and then swung the helmet onto the head with his own hat.

It is all part of the game?

 Sport includes all forms of competitive physical activity or games which, through casual or organized participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants, and in some cases, entertainment for spectators. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete, simultaneously or consecutively, with one winner; in others, the contest (a match) is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other. Some sports allow a “tie” or “draw”, in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one winner and one loser. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs.

Sport is generally recognized as system of activities which are based in physical athleticism or physical dexterity, with the largest major competitions such as the Olympic Games admitting only sports meeting this definition, and other organizations such as the Council of Europe using definitions precluding activities without a physical elements from classification as sports.

However, a number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as mind sports. The International Olympic Committee (through ARISF) recognizes both chess and bridge as bona fide sports, and Sport Accord, the international sports federation association, recognizes five non-physical sports: bridge, chess, draughts (checkers), Go, and limits the number of mind games which can be admitted as sports.

Sport is usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to ensure fair competition, and allow consistent adjudication of the winner. Winning can be determined by physical events such as scoring goals or crossing a line first. Judges, who are scoring elements of the sporting performance, including objective or subjective measures such as technical performance or artistic impression, can also determine it.

Records of performance are often kept, and for popular sports, this information may be widely announced or reported in sport news. Sport is also a major source of entertainment for non-participants, with spectator sport drawing large crowds to sport venues, and reaching wider audiences through broadcasting. Sport betting is in some cases severely regulated, and in some cases is central to the sport.

The world’s most accessible and practiced sport is running, while association football is the most popular spectator sport.

Now talking about American Football (not soccer).

Football is a sport. Football is a game. Two teams try to get the ball down the field to score points. The person with the ball can throw it or run with it. To stop the play, the person holding the ball must be tackled or pushed out of bounds. There are offensive and defensive guards and tackles pushing each other and there is even a kicker.

It is a violent sport even with all the safety gear worn. When a player is injured all the fans applause and wait while the player is being dragged off the field for the game to continue. When players gets too rough the fans boo (or cheer). Yet every play has big burley guys knocking each other down until the whistle blows.

Fights break out and the fans cheer. It is not only football that gets this reaction. Baseball has bench-clearing rumbles, NASCAR has crashes, even tennis has swearing and racket throwing.

Sports are about competition and intensity, but when does it cross the line into a crime?

Assault and battery is the combination of two violent crimes: assault (the threat of violence) and battery (crime) (physical violence). This legal distinction exists only in jurisdictions that distinguish assault as threatened violence rather than actual violence.

At common law, battery is the tort of intentionally and voluntarily bringing about an no consented harmful or offensive contact with a person or to something closely associated with them. Unlike assault, in which the fear of imminent contact may support a civil claim, battery involves an actual contact. The contact can be by one person of another (the victim), with or without a weapon, or the contact may be by an object brought about by the tortfeasor. For example, the intentionally bringing a car into contact with another person, or the intentional striking of a person with a thrown rock, is a battery.

Unlike criminal law, which recognizes degrees of various crimes involving physical contact, there is but a single tort of battery. Lightly flicking a person’s ear is battery, as is severely beating someone with a tire iron. Neither is there a separate tort for a battery of a sexual nature. However, a jury hearing a battery case is free to assess higher damages for a battery in which the contact was particularly offensive or harmful.

Since it is practically impossible to avoid physical contact with others during everyday activities, everyone is presumed to consent to a certain amount of physical contact with others, such as when one person unavoidably brushes or bumps against another in a crowded lift, passage or stairway. However, physical contact may not be deemed as consented to if the acts that cause harm are prohibited acts.

Battery is a form of trespass to the person and as such no actual damage (e.g. injury) needs to be proved. Only proof of contact (with the appropriate level of intention or negligence) needs to be made.

Battery need not require body-to-body contact. Touching an object “intimately connected” to a person (such as an object he or she is holding) can also be battery. Furthermore, a contact may constitute a battery even if there is a delay between the defendant's act and the contact to the plaintiff's injury. For example, where a person who digs a pit with the intent that another will fall into it later, or where a person who mixes something offensive in food that he knows another will eat, has committed a battery against that other when the other does in fact fall into the pit or eats the offensive matter.

In the United States, the common law requires the contact for battery be “harmful or offensive.” The offensiveness is measured against a reasonable person standard. Looking at a contact objectively, as a reasonable person would see it, would this contact be offensive? Thus, a hypersensitive person would fail on a battery action if jostled by fellow passengers on a subway, as this contact is expected in normal society and a reasonable person would not find it offensive. Harmful is defined by any physical damage to the body.

Because courts have recognized a cause of action for battery in the absence of body-to-body contact, the outer limits of the tort can often be hard to define. The Pennsylvania Superior Court attempted to provide some guidance in this regard in Herr v. Booten by stressing the importance of the concept of one’s personal dignity. In that case, college students purchased and provided their friend with alcohol on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. After drinking nearly an entire bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey, the underage man died of acute ethanol poisoning. Reversing the decision of the trial court, the Pennsylvania Superior Court held that supplying a minor with alcoholic beverages, while certainly constituting a negligent act, did not rise to the level of a battery. In the words of Judge Montemuro, supplying a person with alcohol “is not an act which impinges upon that individual's sense of physical dignity or inviolability.”

The victim of a battery need not be aware of the act at the time for the tort to have occurred. For example, if a surgeon performing an appendectomy on an unconscious patient decides to take out the patient's spleen for his personal collection, the surgeon has committed a battery against the patient. Similarly, a battery occurs if the surgeon allows a cousin who is a plumber with no medical training to help fish out the appendix during the surgery. Although the patient has consented to being touched by the surgeon, this consent does not extend to people who the patient would not reasonably anticipate would be participating in the procedure.

The battery may occur even if the victim is unaware of the contact at the time and the defendant is nowhere near the scene at the time of the contact. If a tortfeasor puts an offensive substance in another person’s food, and the other person consumes the offensive substance, the battery has been committed even if the victim is not made aware that they have eaten something offensive until much later.

The degree and quality of intent in civil (tortious) battery is different from that for criminal battery. The degree and quality of intent sufficient for battery also varies between common law countries, and often within differing jurisdictions of those countries. In Australia, negligence in an action is sufficient to establish intent. In the United States, intention to do an act that ultimately results in contact is sufficient for the tort of battery, while intention to inflict an injury on another is required for criminal battery.

Intent can be transferred with battery, i.e. a person swings to hit one person and misses and hits another. He or she is still liable for a battery. Intent to commit a different tort can transfer in the same way. If a person throws a rock towards one person intending only to scare them (but not to hit them), they will be liable for battery to a different person who is hit by that rock.

The standard defenses to trespass to the person, namely necessity, consent, self-defense, and defense of others, apply to battery. As practical examples, under the defense of necessity, a physician may touch a person without that person's consent in order to render medical aid to him or her in an emergency.

Under the defense of consent, a person who has, either expressly or impliedly, consented to participation in a contact sport cannot claim in battery against other participants for a contact permitted by the rules of that sport, or expected to occur within the course of play. For example, a basketball player who commits a hard foul against an opposing player does not thereby commit a battery, because fouls are a regular part of the course of the game, even though they result in a penalty. However, a player who struck another player during a time-out would be liable for battery, because there is no game-related reason for such a contact to occur.

Self-defense as to battery can occur when a person reasonably believes that he or she is going to be attacked by another person, and involves engaging in a reasonable level of physical contact with that person in order to prevent that person from engaging in a physical attack.

I don’t know if a professional (or semi-pro) player has to sign a Release of Liability (Waiver Form) that is a legal document, which prohibits one party from suing another in the event of an accident. If one player knocks down another player, is that all part of the game? Or a crime? Assault and battery?

If the same action took place in a Wal-Mart parking lot; call the cops.