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marricks

I imagine a murder trial would be a lot easier if the person charged was quoted saying:

"I'm going to murder this person"

Compared to

"I hope something bad happens to this person"

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If you are saying things like "This would be a perfect murder weapon" and "I wish John Smith was dead" it will make you more likely to get convicted even if you are innocent.

- It was a joke bro.. sorry, your honor.

Like robbing stores and saying "twas merely a YT prank!"

But are you guilty of murder if you say “Im going to murder this person?”

(IANAL) AFAIK, intent matters a lot in the criminal law, and if the statement is unambiguous it's significantly easier to prove the intent.

Yeah, killing with intent is the very definition of murder. (Edit: Unlawfully) Killing someone without intent is manslaughter, with (generally) a much lighter punishment.

But to answer GP's question, AIUI, merely saying "Im going to murder this person?" does not make someone guilty of murder or attempted murder, or (perhaps surprisingly) even conspiracy to commit murder. Conspiracy usually requires an overt act, like buying a weapon, in addition to the statement of intent.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/conspiracy

Generally it’s only manslaughter if you were reckless or negligent when you killed the person.

there's more nuance to the manslaughter than just killing without intent. you generally have to be doing something wrong in the first place to have it rise to criminality. ianal though and different localities judge it differently.

But the point is you would also have to actually kill them.

no, the point is once they're dead, it matters greatly whether you intended to kill them or not

I agree with the sibling comment about what the point was, though of course you are technically correct as well, but in addition it might be relevant to mention that attempts at someone's life are also punishable. Whether the analogy continues to work for anti-monopoly law, I don't know

Not really. You can’t know if someone you never met killed someone after the fact so you rely on evidence. Some of which is what you say. The jury are regular people, not logicians.

In addition killing is not always a crime.

Many criminal trials have no direct evidence and are totally reliant on circumstantial evidence, so the statement above would be very detrimental to the defense.

It's more like, if you intentionally started avoiding a murder spot specifically before a murder ended up happening there, you'd look a lot more likely to have had some inkling that something wrong was going to happen there than if you had just always been taking the alternative route.

Similarly, if Google was intentionally avoiding using anticompetitive language, it's reasonable to think that they felt they might be facing some anticompetitive behavior related action.

I'd say it's more like:

A lot of people are murdered in location A, we walk past location A frequently, let's not walk by location A anymore because the police are looking at us funny. Then they get pulled into the interrogation room and they use the fact that you stopped going by location A as evidence that you were involved in the murders (that kept happening even after you stopped walking by that location).

Walking past a place perfectly is legal and moral. Abuse of a dominant market position is neither. Google employees weren't being warned against talking about something innocuous that happened to be associated with crime. They were being warned against talking about doing crimes!

They were being warned about speech that is associated with a specific prohibited behavior in an effort to not find the company having to defend against that prohibited behavior at a later date. It's asinine to try to use preemptive training against prohibited behavior as an example of said behavior. It's worse to use it as some kind of evidence of conspiratorial behavior.

It's like if I tell you "It's not ok to murder people" or "We do not murder people" in an email and then a prosecutor uses that email to say I was conspiring to commit murder. If you have a predisposition to think I'm the murderous type, sure you can read it as me trying to obscure what I'm doing. Or you could look at it as me trying to communicate that we don't freaking murder people. Choosing to read it as conspiratorial, without other evidence, says a lot about you and not the group you are accusing.

At the end of the day I do think Google is too big for it's own good and perhaps they hit legal definitions of illegal monopolistic behavior. I do not thing this training is evidence of that fact and should, in fact, be evidence to the contrary.

But the instructions weren't "it's not okay to crush the competition", they were "it's not okay to talk about crushing the competition".

I mean, it is ok to crush the competition. You just have to do it in a manner that is not deemed illegal, right?

As your lawyer I strongly advise you to not say "I'm going to murder this person".

How should I phrase my intent to squeeze the life out of someone then?

I'm planning to excel in the extremely competitive air-breathing segment this quarter.

I will reduce their market share

Instead of drugs, call them onions. Instead of money, call it flowers. Establishing euphemisms.

From Google's perspective, it would be like be charged with murder because you told them to "go to hell", which proves your intent, even though in context, it was obviously a mundane argument.

It would be more like being charged with murder after murdering 4 billion people and then whispering "don't say 'murder' guys".

"I know that you did it, so who cares that the evidence provided is questionable."

If you're 100% confident that they're guilty, you should have no problem with providing better evidence than, "an employee said a nono word" or "Google told their employees not to say a nono word."

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