Liability from attaching a note with tape to an improperly parked car? I am a security officer for a private estate. I frequently deal with cars parking in a way that obstructs other vehicles. On a recent occasion I asked the various tenants of the estate and each denied that the problem card belonged to any of their visitors. I put notices on a couple of the cars with brown tape requesting that the owners move the cars. The notices said that the police would be called and the cars towed if the request was not complied with. The owner of one of the cars is now threatening to sue me for criminal damage. The tape left only a small amount of residue that can easily be removed with soap and water. Is there any liability associated with my actions?
You have the right to notify the owner of the car of their vehicular trespass and the consequences of that. You do not have the right to damage the car in giving said notice. You have the right to offer to clean the gum off whatever part of the car you stuck the notice to. If you succeed in cleaning it,the other party will not have a legal cause of action, in all likelihood, since there is no damage (though with a bit of imagination they might come up with some 'missed business opportunity' loss). The court would probably find your choice of sticker to be negligent (put the notice under the wipers? use painter's tape -get some if you don't have any). The rationale 'we had no other choice' holds no water: there are alternatives. 'Criminal Damages' is a concept in UK law, but it relates to willful damage such as vandalism, not accidents. It would be an issue if you had planned to cause damage, but that seems not to be the case here.
The ultimate legal liability for the damage is probably theirs, although the jurisdiction where this happened would impact the result in principle. Your car insurance may or may not cover third party damage to your car, depending upon what your insurance policy says, probably with a deductible. But, your car insurance would have a right to subrogation which means a right to sue the person who is legally liable for what the insurance company paid, even if it does cover the law. The homeowner's or renter's insurance policy of the homeowner with the dog would be responsible for paying damages and hiring a lawyer for the dog owner if the dog owner was sued, but you might have to sue the homeowner to invoke his insurance policy if it refused to pay upon receiving a demand letter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lien A lien is a form of security interest granted over an item of property to secure the payment of a debt or performance of some other obligation. So the garage might have held a lien on Wilson's car as a way to secure a debt that he owed them, such as payment owed for repairs. If so, it would have prevented Wilson from selling the car until the debt was paid. It would also have made it a little less clear who was truly in possession of the car if the garage had a security interest in the car. However, in this particular case, Wilson had a monthly credit account with the garage. I would assume that means he had come to some arrangement with the garage where they would do the work without demanding payment on the spot, and that he would pay what he owed at the end of the month, or something like that; perhaps on terms like net 30 days. They evidently trusted him enough to grant him unsecured credit, instead of demanding a lien on the car as security. So the issue of a lien did not come up in determining possession. This sort of arrangement would have been a lot more common in 1963, before credit cards were common, so I'm not surprised that your garage today doesn't offer it. Nowadays the garage is more likely to demand payment as soon as the work is done, but you can get much the same effect by paying them with a credit card; then you will have about a month before you have to pay your credit card bill (or begin paying interest on it).
You might suggest that the neighbor consult with their insurance agent, in case the insurance policy does not cover liability from damage caused by standing trees, especially when the policy holder knows that the tree poses a threat to property. The only thing you can do without the neighbor's cooperation is complain to the city, since it's possible that this situation violates a local ordinance, and the city might order him to remove the tree.
To be very straightforward, yes, a police department would very likely have records of their past interactions with you in the form of police reports. They cannot just throw them away because it's been scrubbed from your public record. They detail the interactions the police officer had with you. That being said, those records would not show up in a general inquiry into your record, because those records are meant to protect the officer and the department as a reference point they can go back to in case some dispute arose in the future. If a police officer really wanted to find them, they'd have to do a bit of digging for them. The difficulty in finding them would depend on what system the particular police department uses to store those records. Smaller departments may just file them in a cabinet somewhere, whereas larger ones may actually have their own searchable database. But a traffic cop out on the street is only gonna see what you're seeing at the DMV - nothing. There is also a formal NCIC database, but traffic violations would never end up in there. That is a national database that basically stores red flag persons of interest (think stolen vehicles, sex offenders, and gang members). Sometimes multiple departments within a state will share their information with each other, but a department's database is usually kept to that department only. Also keep in mind court records. The court case that had a violation removed under such and such conditions is still gonna be a public record. Those records would generally be available to a judge overseeing your case so if you repeatedly end up in court for the same thing, they're gonna know and they're gonna stop scrubbing it from your record or offerring certain options because you're clearly not learning your lesson. Many laws allow you to have one offense stricken per year and similar stuff like that, but that kind of stuff doesn't just permanently disappear. They have to keep record of it in order to know you've already had your once per year etc. Also a note about parking violations: not all of those are actually issued by police. If it was issued by a private firm then that is not something that would ever show up on your record. It would just be in a database somewhere with whatever private firm issued the fine. Those kind of tickets get sent to collections and hurt your credit score if you don't pay them, rather than affecting your driving record.
No. Causing someone "pain and suffering" is not against the law; it is merely one kind of damages that can be awarded when someone has done something that is against the law. You may, for instance, endure pain and suffering from a car accident or shooting, in which case you could collect damages for your pain and suffering after proving that the other party committed the torts of negligence or battery, which are illegal. But if you were enduring pain and suffering from the last episode of Lost, you could not collect damages for your pain and suffering because it is not against the law to write a crappy finale. So in your case, cannot sue for pain and suffering based simply on the existence of a secret audio recording. North Carolina allows secret audio recordings, and it does not make exceptions for audio recordings that hurt someone's feelings. But to go beyond your explicit question, there still remains the possibility that you could pursue a legal action. If the other party used that recording in a way that violated the law, that might give rise to a tort that would support an award of damages for pain and suffering. If they publicly distributed a recording of themselves having sex with someone, that might constitute the tort of public disclosure of private facts. If they edited the recording to make it sound like someone had said something that they had not and then gave it to someone else, that might be grounds for a libel action.
The simple answer is, get a lawyer and explain your case, and pay him to solve the problem (or tell you that it's hopeless). The two main questions would be whether the appraiser have any duty to you, and whether his action was within the scope of what he is supposed to do. If you hired the appraiser, he has a duty to you. I will assume it was you that hired the appraiser (if it was the bank, that's a different matter). Then the question is whether his action or non-action is within the scope of the job. If the place is infested with termites, that is probably irrelevant because an appraiser is not a termite inspector. On the other hand, if he failed to measure the structure, or erred substantially in the measurement, that kind of negligence could be legally actionable. The seller (not the appraiser) is required to "disclose", so it's not obvious that there is any thing that an appraiser could disclose that relates to a map.
To be able to sue the appraiser, he would have to have a duty to you. If he was hired by a bank, his duty is to the bank and not to you. Assuming that you directly hired the appraiser, then you would have to check the contract for limits on his liability – a clause that says "you waive your right to sue me for (certain) mistakes". Now supposing that you haven't waived your right to sue, you almost certainly cannot sue for misrepresentation, unless for some reason you can prove that he knew that he was lying to you. Your best bet is arguing that his mistake was negligent. You would have to establish that the first figure was incorrect (a disagreement in figures does not establish which figure is correct). A discrepancy between county records and an appraiser's estimate can be explained by numerous non-negligence related facts (unpermitted modifications of the structure, for example). Suppose that the source of the discrepancy is inclusion of finished basement space in the earlier appraisal, or perhaps measurement error. Then you would have to prove that that error involved a lack of professional care, which implies certain professional standards (not just your feeling that the error is egregious). This article explains the ANSI guidelines. The standard tends to increase square footage because it is measured from the outside. Then you would have to establish that you were damaged by the earlier figure. The law doesn't allow you to sue because someone does something that bugs you, you have to have suffered damage. You don't say how you were harmed – I presume the problem is that the buyer's bank is not willing to lend that much money, where you relied on an earlier incorrect estimate of square footage in advertising the house and setting the price. You may have contributed to the problem by relying on that estimate when you knew or should have known from the government records that the size is something less. There is some possibility of legal recourse, but it's not obvious (so gather all of your facts and talk to your attorney).