It is one thing to scavenge and another to steal someone’s personal property. In The Mandalorian episodes The Child, a group of Jawas in a Sandcrawler were caught stripping the Razer Crest for parts. Multiple issues explode out of this incident.
Grand Theft Jawas
The Razer Crest was the personal property of The Mandalorian. The vehicle was parked on the planet Arvala-7. The Jawas worked collectively to strip the Razer Crest of parts, its outer hull, engine parts, equipment, and the Mandalorian’s weapons locker.
Grand theft is when a person takes real or personal property of another with a value over $950 or when property is taken from an automobile. Cal. Pen. Code § 487(a) and (d)(1). While the interstellar exchange on Beskar is unknown, the value of the Razer Crest and the equipment onboard is easily over $950 in value. The Jawas committed Grand Theft with their stripping and pillaging of the ship, which understandably upset the Mandalorian.
Trading With Jawas for the Return of Stolen Property
The Jawas wanted to “trade” something of value in exchange for the parts to the Razer Crest. Normal contract negotiations include an offer, terms, acceptance, consideration, and performance. This is rather insulting when the trade is for the return of personal property. This raises the issue of economic duress, which is when “a wrongful act which is sufficiently coercive to cause a reasonably prudent person faced with no reasonable alternative to succumb to the perpetrator’s pressure.” Andrieu v. Aquantia Corp., H044638, at *13-14 (Cal. Ct. App. Nov. 21, 2018). Moreover, a party can rescind a contract if consent was “obtained through duress, menace, fraud, or undue influence.” CA Civ. Code § 1689(b)(1). Furthermore, statutory duress is when there is the unlawful detention of a person’s property. CA Civ. Code § 1569.
The Jawas demanding the Mandalorian to retrieve “The Egg” from a vicious wild animal in order to recover his personal property meets every meaning of “duress” in contract law. The Jawas found bold new ways to benefit from their lawless behavior, the most extreme in making someone risk their life for breakfast.
Adventures in Babysitting
The Mandalorian took his infant Target on a mission to storm the Jawas’ high speed Sandcrawler and on the worst egg hunt imaginable. This is in addition to fighting off Trandoshans and a gunfight with Jawas. Has the Mandalorian engaged in child endangerment?
California defines child endangerment as the following:
Any person who, under circumstances or conditions likely to produce great bodily harm or death, willfully causes or permits any child to suffer, or inflicts thereon unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering, or having the care or custody of any child, willfully causes or permits the person or health of that child to be injured, or willfully causes or permits that child to be placed in a situation where his or her person or health is endangered, shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison for two, four, or six years.
Cal. Pen. Code § 273a(a).
Whether there has been child endangerment is highly fact specific. The Target’s bassinet following the Mandalorian while he attempted to board the Sandcrawler could have produced “great bodily harm” if the Jawas had fired upon the bassinet. The Jawas also deployed more medieval countermeasures of throwing objects at the Mandalorian, which could have caused injury if directed at the Target. However, since the bassinet was out of the line of fire from the bassinet, one can argue it was safer for the bassinet to follow the Mandalorian instead of being left alone in the desert.
The Mandalorian made the least dangerous decision by taking the Target with him to secure the Egg. Given the options to recover the parts were either leave the Target with Kuiil, who was with the Jawas who had expressed interest in the Target, the Mandalorian would have been rightfully concerned for the Target’s safety in the event more bounty hunters attacked or the Jawas turned on Kuiil. While leaving the Target to the side while confronting a large animal was not Plan A, it was the least bad option available to the Mandalorian.
