Man kills himself after Police falsely said he critically injured woman in crash | Hacker News Reader

Man kills himself after Police falsely said he critically injured woman in crash

nbcnews.com

22 pointsfortran7728 comments

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said in a statement that she agrees with the watchdog's findings and suspended the officer for six days without pay, according to a police statement Thursday.

Six days without pay for taking a human life. Here's a radical proposal: why not hang him? Or imprison him for decades? Or even just fire him? Or do literally anything? That's not even a slap on the wrist, that's a vacation.

Why is it that cops can get away with everything under the sun?

There are so many instances of this it's ridiculous.

If the United States doesn't see reform for these thugs, it seems impossible that a dramatic inversion of the current status quo won't happen.

He didn't take a human life; he lied about a guy. Why not hang you for lying about him?

He drove a man to suicide on a lie: for all reasonable intents and purposes, that's murder.

Wrong. That's slander.

You can't just make stuff up.

He lied with intention, I said something I believe to be true.

By the definition of murder, my statement seems to be accurate.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/murder

The article says:

> While officers are allowed to use a ruse, investigators said the officer’s lie “shocked the conscience” and was inconsistent with the police department’s policy.

He did something that he’s allowed to do (lie) but he took it a little too far. He might be negligent to some degree, but this is not “murder”.

> By the definition of murder, my statement seems to be accurate.

You're going to have to clarify that a bit. Lol.

> By the definition of murder, I believe my statement is accurate

Murder implies intention. This would be more akin to involuntary manslaughter since there's no reasonable expectation that the intent of the lie was to cause death (or any physical harm for that matter). This doesn't mean he doesn't deserve punishment, just not for murder.

But the fact that you believe something to be correct would serve as mitigating circumstances at best since the very definition you quote describes something completely different from what is being discussed.

> the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought

> to kill (a human being) unlawfully and with premeditated malice

I'm no lawyer, so I was trying to not argue on those grounds, however:

What he did seems to fall under modern interpretations of malice aforethought/what it's morphed to (see page 428-429; ctrl-f "recklessness" if desired).

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

It wasn't premeditated, so it seems like second degree murder, doesn't it?

> It wasn't premeditated, so it seems like second degree murder, doesn't it?

Still no. You can google "involuntary manslaughter" as mentioned in my previous comment. Murder implies malice, intent, when the death of the victim is a likely outcome. You're talking about getting into a bar fight and stabbing someone. There's a distinct possibility stabbing someone will kill them. But nobody reasonably expects a verbal accusation will kill anyone.

"But nobody reasonably expects a verbal accusation will kill anyone."

It was a foreseeable consequence of the officer's actions. Thus intent could be imputed. Therefore, it could reasonably be construed as an intentional homicide i.e. murder.

> It was a foreseeable consequence of the officer's actions.

The only case that I know of when words lead to suicide for one and manslaughter conviction for the other is when one urged the other to do it [0]. And it still wasn't murder.

This feels like arguing for the sake of arguing. There's no way a reasonable judge and jury would ever consider this to be murder. And it would be a very dangerous precedent to set. Investigators, as far as I've heard, have free reign to lie during interrogations in order to extract more information, and will eventually even have an innocent person as a suspect. Regular people might say something to someone who was more sensitive than they expected.

[0] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/06/16/woman-w...

I agree that the cop committed homicide by negligence rather than premeditated, but I will never understand why people sometimes make the argument that words are so powerless, when they're our species's primary form of communicating information. Anything anybody has ever done has ultimately been a reaction to information. "Nobody reasonably expects a verbal accusation will kill anyone" is just a blatantly wrong claim.

Cops don't have to face consequences. Who would arrest them?

By this logic, should Jim Carrey be put to death as well? It is claimed he drove his ex-fiance to her death.

Are you saying that his case was as negligent as this one? You can't just imply that two things are equal with no details given at all.

It seems Carrey was especially cruel in his treatment of his ex-fiance. At least the cop had a reason (seeking to flush the criminal) for his actions. Carrey was just plain mean.

Surely it depends on details. The cop told a lie that would obviously drive some people to suicidal thoughts ("you may have killed an innocent person"). If Carrey did something similarly concrete, then yes, he would reasonably fall into the same category by the parent post's qualifiers. Or he may have used less direct torments, being generally cruel over a timeframe. That wouldn't necessarily be better or worse, but it would call for a different analysis. The point being that the comparison seems fruitless. Whether or not they're the same depends on the details, and whether the answer is yes or no, I don't see how it affects this case.

Edit: "killed" -> "may have killed"

So cops shouldn’t be surprised when people assume everything they say is a lie. Perhaps they should consider the secondary effects of this kind of policy...

Sadly, most normal people tend to universally believe cops when they testify in court, despite the fact that they're generally no more truthful there than when speaking to suspects.

The officer got six days of vacation and name suppression. Lucky guy; Carmen Ortiz didn't get either.

Poor Ortiz, she just got lawyer money for those entire six days of vacation she should have took. She didn't even take the "mandatory training" that apparently all of Seattle's thugs have gone through this year on being told when they can lie!

Never talk to police. They are not your friends.

I think a key problem is that the police should not be able to lie to you. In a formal interrogation, with an attorney present, maybe. But even then it should be absolutely restrictive to the point of ineffective.

Anecdotal evidence and survivorship bias is strong here. Cops tend to be human beings on a medium income. If you want the apropriate penalty for irresponsible cops then you need to look further than wrongdoing of the individual. Cops are in the line of work in which every mistake is a wrongfull imprisonment, death or negligence. What if your work didn't allow for a single white lie or error? Wouldn't you demand higher pay? Or would less people be willing to work in your field? It is also not obvious from all this anecdotal evidence that cops are more likely to be morally corrupt. All research done towards discriminating cops have shown the opposite. It feels like every couple of years the news finds a new scapegoat. I used to read stories about monsanto, evil wall street and bankers filling their own pockets. Now the theme is injustice of lawfull force.

The news story is that the cop told a lie that caused a person to kill themselves. There's no bias to that; it's a simple cause and effect. The news story doesn't even really editorialize it. It's just what happened. I don't see how paying police more would mean they're never cruel.

And by the way, if you're wondering why he killed himself over this: if he was a drug addict he was probably in trouble with the law a lot. He's probably used to being harassed by cops (hard to say without knowing his identity, but seems pretty likely based on how the law treats addicts). There's a decent chance if caught he was going to get into a lot more trouble than the average person, especially if he had been in and out of the system.

Ofcouse the story itself doesn't show any bias. But the summation of only seeing police cases of reported injustice is going to create the illusion that there might be something rotten in the police force. The truth is that policework is similar to surgery, 6% might not survive low risk surgeries. The best surgeon will have a lower mortality rate, the worst will hae a significantly higher rate. But we dont shame and blame minor misconduct, misstepts or errors because there is an understanding that surgery is done to the best of our ability, even for the rookie surgeon, and it CAN go wrong against all odds. Yet this simple analysis doesn't get to be applied to these police stories because we're unable to seperate the individual story in which we know with 100% certainty mistakes were made by a policeofficer from the overarching story of policeofficers making the wrong decision 6% of the time.

The only thing that has really changed is body cameras leading to some measures of accountability, certain communities of people have been complaining about the police for decades.

That said, I do believe officers should be better compensated and we as a society shouldn’t use police as social workers unless we’re going to appropriately train them.

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