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Contents [hide]
1 Contact required
2 Awareness not required
3 Degree of intent
4 Defenses
5 References
6 See also
Contact required[edit]
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. If there is an attempted
battery, but no actual contact, that may constitute a tort of assault.
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
Because courts have recognized a cause of action for battery in the absence
of body-to-body contact,[3] 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[4] 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."[5]
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.
Degree of intent[edit]
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.[6] 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.
Defenses[edit]
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 first, 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
second, 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 gamerelated reason for such a contact to occur.