Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

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The case for "Reasonable Doubt" ... came across it on reddit.

>he had severe heart disease

>he had an enlarged heart

>he had 75% to 90% occlusion of his three major coronary arteries

>he had untreated severe hypertension

>he had a previously recorded BP of 216/160

>he had a tumor (extra-adrenal paraganglioma) associated with hypertension/heart attacks

>his lungs were 2-3x heavier than normal (pulmonary edema)

>he had COVID

>he was a smoker

>he was nodding off/passed out when police arrived at his SUV

>he had to be physically nudged to be awoken

>he was in the SUV with his personal drug dealer(s)

>he had a white substance in his mouth

>he was saying he couldn't breathe before restraint

>the knee on the back of the neck is a technique used by the MPD and nearly every other law enforcement agency in the world

>it is used to prevent them thrashing about and harming others (and themselves)

>it is an extremely common method of restraining an individual's range of motion and view

>it did not occlude both (or even one) of the carotid arteries or restrict the airway

>it is well documented to be generally very safe

>EMS was called early but arrived late

>the hobble was not used to avoid further delaying medical care

>the hostile crowd distracted the police and the EMS didn't want to give on-scene medical care because it was not secure for their safety

>he had an oxygen saturation of 98% at the hospital >the autopsy revealed no abrasions, bruising, hematomas, or fractured bones in the shoulder/neck area

>he had a number of drugs in his system, including fentanyl (depressant) and methamphetamine (stimulant/vasoconstrictor)

>he had a fatal amount of fentanyl in his system

>he swallowed drugs during his 2019 arrest

>fentanyl/methamphetamine pills were found in the back of > the squad car, containing Floyd's DNA, also in the SUV

Anyone else get 1984 vibes? I can't fathom how one can see a man kneeling on someone's neck for nine minutes and then say "there must be another reason he died," but apparently that's the level of discourse we find ourselves in.

That same level of observation leads to thinking that vaccines cause autism. We shouldn't ignore our eyes, but neither should we trust them blindly.

I don't doubt that the knee on the neck was a necessary condition for Floyd's death at that moment, but was it a sufficient condition?

If we replaced Floyd in that moment with a randomly sampled person from the adult population, what percentage would've died in that same situation? 1%? 5%? 30%? 100%?

Fun fact: as long as it was a necessary condition, it's still murder. It's no different than if you shoot someone with stage 4 cancer.

It's not automatically murder when someone's action was a necessary condition behind another's death.

For the sake of argument, suppose that we know that some action leads to a death 0.0001% of the time. In such a situation, murder would be an inappropriate charge, because a person shouldn't reasonably be expected to have known that their actions would lead to that death. For example, imagine that someone has a stress-induced heart attack as a consequence of a police encounter. Is that murder? Obviously not, even though in this example the police's existence was a necessary condition behind the cortisol spike which lead to that heart attack.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you shoot someone intentionally, you know that there's a ~50% chance that they'll die from that, so your intention to kill is implied from the act and murder is therefore appropriate.

I don't believe that 0.0001% is the correct figure for what Chauvin did to Floyd, it's certainly higher, but it's not an irrelevant question.

If Chauvin believed he was following MPD procedure (which he wasn't exactly, but it was fairly close to training materials), and that procedure leads to death only a very small % of the time, there's a plausible case for a lesser manslaughter charge there, or even no criminal charge at all in the general case where procedure was followed closely (which it wasn't here) and that procedure is generally safe.

This is incorrect. Chavin is charged with felony murder, which is when a death is the result of another felony (in this case, 2nd degree assault). All the state has to prove is the assault charge (that he intentionally took action, that action was not a justified use of force, and that the action caused harm), and that his actions were a significant cause of death. They don't have to prove intent to kill or that a reasonable person would realize it would cause death. Only that he assaulted Floyd, and that his actions did cause (not did exclusively cause) death

I don't believe it's incorrect. For the third-degree murder charge, the defendant must commit the act "evincing a depraved mind".

If the defendant thinks that they're following official protocol correctly and their training told them that that protocol was safe, then they're not "evincing a depraved mind", and are therefore not guilty of third-degree murder. The belief states of the defendant are relevant in this particular charge.

  "(a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years."

Supposedly, though, the jury in this case thought that Chauvin was indeed "evincing a depraved mind" (given the guilty verdict).

In America, guilt beyond reasonable doubt must be determined for someone to be found guilty. Both sides get the opportunity to state their case, and above is their list of why there is potential doubt in guilt. It's our legal system working.

It's obviously his fault, but the cops could have prevented him from tragically taking his own life

I think it's especially important to keep in mind that George Floyd is not on trial.

He was alive before his interaction with the police.

Generally police officers are not held responsible for suspects dying from a heart attack during arrest. Either while running away from the police officer, or while resisting arrest.

You could use the same argument against vaccines and say because someone died shortly after receiving a vaccine that vaccines kill people. It’s the same with this police interaction, given the amount of police interactions and often the nature of the interactions, drug related, it is a statistical certainty that a death with occur during the interaction. Coincidence does happen, it isn’t a myth. Did his interaction trigger anxiety in the individual that made issues more likely, of course, but that is the risk you have to deal with when you are committing crimes and doing drugs.

The people downvoting should refute, not downvote, as this is just a list of claims. If there’s falsehoods would be more effective to clarify than dismiss.

No, they shouldn't. Piling on claims is a well-known bad-faith argument tactic called the Gish gallop[1]. The poster has provided no source, and it would take hours just to verify all the claims, before even getting to whether or not they were material. It works precisely because it's much easier to make claims than refute them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

It’s not a gish gallop, it’d have to be claims not supporting a single thesis or hard to refute. Each of these is a small claim directly relevant. If you could find even 2-3 to refute that’d do.

The problem with fallacies is they are not always clear when and how to apply, which creates a whole new fallacy where people mis-apply fallacies to try and “win” quickly (is there a name for this? The fallacy fallacy?)

A good faith argument would at least call out one or two incorrect points here.

I disagree. Engaging implicitly validates the argument. If you refute X, they can just come back with "yes but what about Y?" and, should you eventually get bored or run out of time, they use your failure to properly rebut as evidence of their thesis.

I'm also not familiar with any argument that a Gish gallop must make claims not supporting a single thesis, or that they must be hard to refute (as opposed to simply harder to refute than to state). Whatever it is, I don't subscribe to it, and I don't believe those are the traits which make the argument style inappropriate.

Engaging with an argument validates it? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Gish gallop was invented to categorize the specific style of politicians and charlatans that will throw out myriad claims to dismantle and confuse conversations with too many directions, and to have many of the claims be hard to even refute as they are vague. The vagueness and multi-directionality is the usual marker of it.

I don’t see how these claims are meant to move in diverse directions, or how any isn't relevant, each is a pretty refutable small piece of evidence connected directly to determining the truth of the case here.

The refutation is really simple. Despite all of this, he was doing just fine until he was murdered.

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