Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

Re: A well known incident

Your friend is wrong, you are right. There is a famous case that is taught in law school to teach you this rule. It involves a kid who was in line at a cafeteria, and someone grabbed the plate out of the kid's hand. The question is the same - is that a battery? Yes. Another case involves involves knocking a cane out of a person's hand, and that is a battery. Same as pulling a chair out before someone sits down, and they hit the floor - it's a battery.

Re: A well known incident

You are right, though your reasoning is not quite correct. If only actual contact with a person could be deemed a battery, then striking a person through his clothing would not qualify. Such a result would be absurd, since a minor slap to the face would be a battery but a major blow to a clothed area would not. In battery cases, the law therefore generally treats anything a person is carrying as an extension of him/herself. The law thus regards as battery any intentional, unwelcome physical contact with a person or with any object worn, carried by or otherwise connected to that person.

(Please note that this discussion is a bit imprecise. A detailed answer would take more time than I have at the moment and would exceed this site's maximum word count.)

The reason why the Rogers incident qualifies as a battery thus has nothing to do with the fact that the camera was "being operated" at the time. The fact that the cameraman was carrying it is enough to make it an extension of his person in the eyes of the law, and the same would be true even if the camera had been hanging idly from his neck.