The Deadly Spring-Gun Trap
A Whatcom man faces a murder conviction for setting a booby-trapped shotgun to defend his vacant cabin.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The verdict of murder in the second degree found by the jury at Whatcom against Newell Harr seems to us sound in law and equity. Harr, before going forth to hunt, so fixed a heavily-loaded gun within the cabin that any attempt to forcibly open the door thereof would result in its discharge and almost certain death to anybody who attempted to enter. In equity and common sense, no man has any more right to set up such a death-dealing contrivance within his house on leaving it than he has when he occupies it. There are a hundred reasons which might justify a man in trying the door of a neighbor's house—he might be a police officer; he might be a man seeking shelter in sudden sickness or stress of weather; he might think the premises on fire. It would be an outrage on public safety to allow any man to set a death trap for the community, since he is quite as likely to slay an innocent as a guilty intruder.
“There is no law which justifies any man in filling his house full of engines of death.”
This 1894 case touches on a perennial legal debate: the limits of self-defense and the protection of property. While modern 'castle doctrine' laws have evolved, the editorial's warning against 'death traps' highlights a long-standing civic tension between individual property rights and public safety.
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