Dzhokhar Tsarnaev charged with using ‘weapon of mass destruction’
washingtonpost.com
This is the most bizarre and dangerous definition of 'WMD' that I've ever seen.
washingtonpost.com
Seriously, this should not be the first time that some of you guys have encountered a legal term that doesn't match up with the colloquial sense of the term.
And we shouldn't be predicating crimes on the competence of their perpetrators - their pressure cooker bombs did injure more than a hundred people. Had they engineered it optimally, they likely could have killed tens of more people.
Is a gun a weapon of mass destruction? Why not?
I think an assault rifle would've done a lot more damage than the pressure cooker.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/definition_of_...
Here's the legal code which describes a "destructive device" (passed in 1968 and amended several times):
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921
Note that it is so broadly written that it has to specifically exclude antique muzzle-loading rifles.
The 'mass' part reflects the principle of damage radiating outward from the origin and affecting whoever/whatever happens to be in proximity, as opposed to the more targeted destruction caused by a bullet or handheld weapon. Of course you could kill multiple people with a handheld weapon or (rarely) hit several people with a single bullet, but in general such attacks involve one-on-one interactions even if there is a series of them in rapid order, as with automatic gunfire. hitting multiple individuals from a single shot or manual attack is considered a fluke.
See notes on http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a and http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921
Note that the law is not necessarily drafted to reflect the actual probability of injury, but to dissuade any use of the method; explosive, chemical, biological and radioactive attacks are by nature indiscriminate. That's considered much worse than an attack on a particular individual (you could launch an indiscriminate attack by, say, firing a gun into a crowd. But that lack of care about who you hit would itself attract a higher sentence). Furthermore, it radiates temporally; if you plant a device and then drop dead of a heart attack, the device remains dangerous even though you are no longer capable of forming criminal intent. It presents risk from when it's emplaced to when it has finished releasing, a period which could last years. In similar fashion, using a bomb or poison to kill someone automatically makes the offense into Murder in the First Degree, negating defenses like 'crime of passion' or 'heat of the moment'.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder#Concl...
Or maybe a better way of characterizing the problem area is that it is deeply related to how we want to respond to patterns of violence caused by foreign, non-state actors: terrorist groups, drug cartels, organized crime, private militias, etc. (including US citizens that are involved with those foreign non-state actors).
The Miranda exception is not at all designed for warfare, and as far as I know there is no one within the current Administration even suggesting they might accede to what Graham/McCain suggest doing with regard to treating Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.
I've decided to just treat Graham and McCain as if they're representing the Golden Dawn party for now.
The term "WMD" being used here has a specific legal meaning which is far different from the more well-known military meaning, and is valid for the charges in question.
If it makes you feel better, imagine they charged him with "homocidial douchebaggery"...
I really enjoy a good bit of legal context. No doubt that trained prosecutors do things for legitimate and rational reasons.
However, there is also a role for the "peanut gallery" of uninformed speculation here. In fact, I'd argue the public perception of this stuff is 1000 times more important than the legalese.
You want a crime that's got "mass destruction" in the title, you need to demonstrate to the common man that this involves mass destruction. I don't believe that's too much to ask from the system.
Since when did blowing up two bombs that cause 3 fatalities and 150+ persons to sustain often-horrific injuries not count as as mass event? It is not the prosecutor's fault that American servicemembers have caused the medical field to innovate for the past ten years on how to save lives in response to these attacks.
But that's not the way the law is worded. Right now, a high-school student playing around with blackpowder in an effort to blow up his neighbor's mailbox is flirting around with getting a WMD charge. Do you want that in the same category as this? I don't.
I must have missed where the "mass destruction" part was defined.
Don't get me wrong, if he's guilty, I'm about as hardcore as a person could be about what to do with him. I'm just trying to figure out what the hell the government has done to our criminal justice system in the name of the war on terror.
EDIT: From a friend on FB, the definition of Mass Destruction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Crim...
"other device with a charge of more than four ounces"
So a few shotgun shells in a mailbox, which is a mean, vile, lethal weapon and might easily deserve the death penalty, but now it's also a WMD?
I hate to put this so bluntly, but the only thing that this tells me is that idiots are defining legal terms.
Are there any grownups in charge of making these laws?
It ties in nicely with defining environmental activists who had never killed anybody (and who had taken pains to avoid doing so) as terrorists after 9/11.
Yes, there are grownups in charge of making such laws, and perhaps you might benefit from contemplating the principles behind such laws before projecting your understanding of a term onto the legislative language. 'Weapon of mass destruction' is a categorical definition, not a quantitative one. The quantitative aspect of the case will be reflected in the number of murder/battery charges.
And so further down the Orwellian tunnel of language distortion we go: if we (the good guys of course) do it then it's collateral damage and enhanced interrogation; if they (those evil scum) do it then it's weapons of mass destruction.
I think when people hear WMD they take it to mean nuclear chemical and biological weapons capable of killing thousands in an instant or very short space of time. There is no way anyone seriously considers an IED of any crappy variety to be a WMD no matter how it is deployed or what the intent behind the murders is.
But yeah, let's keep on barreling down that road, let's see where it'll take us.
EDIT: as anigbrowl points out the answer is pre: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591399 Also interestingly mass in this sense means indiscriminate as opposed to targeted. I don't know is it just me or were others under the impression that mass meant on a massive scale. It certainly seems to have been used in that sense in the run-up to Iraq 2003 at which time it entered the public lexicon. And as I say I don't remember any legal-heads piping up to correct the misconception.
I don't see this as the state reserving special privileges over the individual, incidentally; it seems to me that this an inevitable consequence of multiple individuals pooling a small degree of their individual sovereignty into military and police forces.