Woman who was shot while pregnant is charged in fetus's death
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The headline is shocking, but I can certainly imagine situations like this in which a negligent parent is responsible for putting their child/fetus at risk. Is there a precedent for a manslaughter charge for something like this?
As of 2015 three states criminalize substance abuse particularly during pregnancy: Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee.
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/maternity-drug-poli...
It's a little convoluted and probably won't stand up in court.
The instant someone pulls a gun trigger, they assume legal responsibility for the path of the bullet, and everything it does along that path.
If I fire a shot in justified self-defense but miss and kill someone else, I can (and should) be charged with manslaughter. That makes good legal sense, as far as I can tell.
In some states if you rob a bank and cop shoots at you but misses and hits and kills a bystander, then YOU the robber who did NOT shoot anyone will be charged with manslaughter.
that is sort of what is happening here.
So if a policeman is willfully negligent and doesn’t keep up his target practice, his own lack of skill could result in someone else being charged with manslaughter. I disagree: If anyone is charged, it should be him—though I do recognize the court would rightly not hold him responsible if a reasonably competent person couldn’t have been expected to do better.
If it worked that way, perhaps people would think twice more often before discharging a firearm - and fewer people would be harmed.
But it sounds to me like the root cause is probably misogyny and what a lot of people would decry as "the evils of patriarchy."
As best I can infer, some guy got a woman pregnant that he wasn't married to. Before the baby is even born, he's keeping company with some other woman, probably de facto abandoning the pregnant woman and their child in the process. The two women fought. The fetus died.
He's not likely to ever be charged with anything. We are just going to argue about which woman he was screwing should be hung high.
Blacks and women: it's your fault your lives don't work. We don't want to talk about systemic issues, like how we think all men are entitled to sex and are not to be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. If your life gets ruined because he knocked you up and promptly bailed, well, bitch, it's your fault for spreading your legs, clearly.
Next!
a poor Black woman
The logic is that she committed manslaughter by dragging the infant-to-be into a violent confrontation that she started, and which she escalated to the point that force was justified in defense against her (that part seems to be considered established). Like if you involved yourself in a high speed chase with an infant in the car, and that infant died in the proceedings, you would likely be guilty of manslaughter (in Alabama and some other places).
In practice, prosecutors in Canada are quite likely to charge you with a crime no matter what to let the court decide rather than making that decision themselves. Once it hits court, juries are usually quite sympathetic to the self defense argument.
(Not a lawyer, this is all heresay).
The law may differ on duty to retreat and other matters (though in this case the victim retreated after retaliating), but at the end of the day, there is a circumstance where use of deadly force is justified against a person, whether that person is a pregnant woman or not. You're not meant to simply roll over and die when attacked by a pregnant woman so as not to offend the sensibilities of some random HN commenter.
You are extremely wrong in that thought. One wrong bump on the head, and you are a goner. Don't get in a fight, don't start a fight, and don't stay in a fight you won't finish. Two average-build women fighting is perilous for the participants just like two average-build men fighting.
In the heat of an argument, one or the other is going to get the upper hand, and maybe today they don't choose a good time to stop pounding their opponent's head into the pavement. If you aren't willing to defend yourself, you can only hope that your opponent will show mercy when the time comes; I don't think it is really appropriate to ask the victim of an escalating battery to wait and see if they'll be killed once the situation is completely out of their control.
More details will probably become available, but there are circumstances that can be established, under which the charge discussed makes sense, and under which the person who fired the firearm is not guilty of an offence; such as if the pregnant woman is committing assault in the first or second degree.
> The death statistics of U.S. compared to other countries don't support the theory that guns are used only in mortal danger.
What kind of non-sequitur is that? Nobody is making that claim or any statement that could depend on it.
On a personal note, I agree with this. It is unjust to ask people to wait until they're dead to defend themselves, when another person has initiated force that could rapidly become deadly.
It is not uncommon that one pushes another over in anger, and that other is killed. That's not manslaughter, that's murder.
P.S: Be careful mixing up lethal with deadly, or either of those with fatal. There are subtle but important differences.
What, like a cliff? No, I don't think "getting pushed over" is a statistically significant cause of death.