Legal Advice: Ghostbusters Edition

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you know that there is a new Ghostbusters film on the horizon.  Before that film hits theatres, let’s take a look at Ghostbusters of yesterday and how they would be thrown into a prison so deep and dark they’d never see the light of day.

Flash back to 1984 and the Ghostbusters are working on their little kickstarter business working off the money Ray Stantz borrowed against his mother’s house.  They proceed to start “busting ghosts”, which we’ll address directly in a moment.  What is the equipment they are using.

“Each one of us has an unlicensed nuclear accelerator strapped to his back.”  Bill Murray’s performance makes that sound like a very funny line, until you start thinking about the implications of that.  First off, it’s a miniature particle accelerator, like the one at CERN (which is licensed).  Now I understand that the Ghostbuster tech is all fictional, so I thought I’d take a look at what their specific fictional universe said about the proton pack.

Fudging of science aside, the tie in media states very plainly that each one of these things has a self-destruct blast radius of ½ a mile.  That’s roughly a six city block radius from ground zero.  See the map for details.  Destruction of that magnitude would be very similar to the Oklahoma City Bombing only with the destruction being almost all inclusive.  A typical explosive device has directionality to it.  Any explosion will always follow the path of least resistance.  The afore mentioned bombing shows half the building destroyed, because the explosion, as it expands found the weaker materials to be the path of least resistance and affected them more profoundly.

 

A nuclear explosion is a different kind of event though.  Its far more powerful.  The blast radius may “only” be ½ a mile, but the destruction in that half mile will be far more severe.  On top of that, there are four of these things.  Now that’s not saying the radius would be 2 miles, but rather in that half mile the rather than charred people and crushed buildings you’d probably just have a crater.  Even then, that’s only if the packs were sitting next to each other.  If they were spread out over half a mile in radius from the pack that exploded, each of those would have a blast radius of half a mile.

But the Ghostbusters are scientists, I hear you say.  Well they are, but they aren’t exactly “ethical”.  There’s a very good reason why Peter Venkman stonewalls the EPA lawyer and they packs are unlicensed, what they are doing is very illegal and they could go to jail and no licensing agency with even an atom of common sense would authorize them to build or carry those things.  The proton packs along promise a major fine, confiscation of their equipment and a potential of 10 years in prison, which explains part of the legal case against them in the beginning of Ghostbusters 2.  Why they still had physical access to the proton packs I have no idea, unless due to their “saving the city” warranted them the right to keep the devices but never turn them on.

Imagine a 10 year prison sentence for flipping on a switch.

Now about the containment unit, or “busting ghosts”; this is where we get into some fun “unknown” laws.  Specifically we are going to talk about the “Undiscovered Species Act”.  What this boils down to is if a scientist in the field locates a creature nobody has ever seen before, like bigfoot, and captures or kills it without just cause (ie they were defending their own life), they could face up to 10 years in prison and or have lose any money you received for it because you removed such a rare creature from its habitat.  While this is a county law almost exclusive to Skamania County, Washington this sets what prosecutors can use as a legal precedent to base their case off of.  The ghosts would actually fall under the protection of this act.  They are a rare creature, so rare that we have no way of knowing if they can reproduce.  They seem to consume some sort of fuel to stay active, they have a general habitat, and they are rare enough that most people don’t believe they exists.

In the Ghostbuster’s first real case, in which they capture Slimer, they charge the hotel manager $5,000.  By law, they have to turn that money over to a university, probably the very university they were fired from, along with Slimer for proper scientific study.  They are not an accredited institution, and therefore cannot keep the creature.

But ghosts are just dead people, I hear you say.  Are they?  What do we really know about them given the context of the films and television show?  They are basically energy based life forms.  They have a degree of sentience, an ability to identify and react to danger, an ability to choose based on available data.  At best this is an “Undiscovered Species Act” issue, at worst you are looking at a civil rights suit.

So yes, for their first act as the Ghostbusters, they would be facing terrible fines and possibly up to 20 years in prison.

Who are you going to call, indeed?

 

Thanks for reading.