Vehicular manslaughter charge upgraded to murder because of tweets
bigstory.ap.org
bigstory.ap.org
As a society, we tend to lack accountability when a car is involved. If he, for instance, killed someone by swinging an axe around a playground for fun, there'd be no question about murder charges.
If it were common practice to be swinging an axe around in the classroom for hours straight we'd probably be more lenient to the accidents that would have occurred as well.
The reason? A moving mass has a kinetic energy equal to 1/2 mv^2 -- note the squared velocity term. I think this is something that young drivers should be taught. Older drivers learn this by experience and acquired instinct, but young drivers, especially those who don't learn physics or mathematics in school, may learn it the hard way.
Reference: http://arachnoid.com/conservation_of_energy/#Kinetic_Energy
Momentum: p = mv
Kinetic Energy: E = 1/2 mv^2
IOW E is the first integral of p with respect to velocity.
Your suggestion has something important going for it, though -- more massive vehicles would have to slow down.
(Road design is a fascinating field; the intersection of physics, materials science, automobile engineering, and human psychology. It's possible to design a road to allow the average person to drive a modern midsize sedan in relative safety given good weather conditions, but you have to make the road a closed system (controlled access) and become zealous about maintaining it and the cars that use it. The Autobahn, in other words.)
Fair enough, but don't forget inexperience, an important factor, one that disproportionately affects young drivers.
The trick is to make the ramp-up as uneventful as possible and to arrest the decline before it's serious. Sadly, adults who've driven for decades are commonly loathe to ever give it up, and for good reason in our car-centric society.
Also, I think the whole concept of field drug testing is misguided because it's using a bad proxy when a direct test, in the form of field reaction time testing, wouldn't be any harder to accomplish. Reaction time testing doesn't test judgment skills, but neither does testing for BAC, necessarily, and focusing on BAC ignores fatigue, which is a known killer. (And we allow stupid people to drive anyway.)
Are we talking Lincoln Continentals, or Volkswagon Beetles?
That's a reasonable rule of thumb, but it doesn't work in all cases -- it makes too many assumptions. It only takes driver reaction time into account, and it serves to partly explain why accidents in fog tend to involve many cars and high levels of injury and destruction.
The reason? The two second rule assumes the car in front of you has the same stopping distance characteristics as your car, once the brakes are applied. But if the car in front of yours abruptly stops by hitting an immovable object (instead of skidding to a stop) and you are two seconds behind him, you will surely collide with him also, and the car behind you will collide with you, ad infinitum. People who drive at normal speeds in fog apparently don't realize this.
So a new proposed rule -- if you can't see the car in front of the car in front of you, pull over and catch up on your reading. I doubt this rule will take hold.
I typically find that when I'm being tail-gated it's someone in their mid-life, I don't know if there is a problem with young people knowing about stopping distances.
I do know there is a problem with young people like me driving recklessly and causing crashes, I just think that there's a possibility that that comes from, well, recklessness. They know the facts and choose to ignore them.
That's admirable, but I think it would be better to know why those distances are true, i.e. the velocity-squared rule. The idea is very simple, certainly simpler than memorizing a bunch of distances or even noticing the overall relationship between speed and distance.
> They know the facts and choose to ignore them.
There's a substantial literature about how the teenage brain is wired differently than the brains of those both older and younger. Giving them a car only exacerbates the problem. The irony is that a 10-year-old, and a 25-year-old, would both be likely safer drivers than a 15-year-old.
It would be interesting to see a graph of driver safety versus age -- ascending safety as age progresses from zero to about 12 (hypothetically, of course), then a really big dip in safety centered on 16, then another ascent, a long level spell between 25 and 60, then a tailing off after age 60, finally a terrible and irreversible decline after about 75.
As a start, apparently 25% of road deaths are among 15-19 year-olds (src: http://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/d...).
We are usually taught about the velocity squared rule! I think I recall one of the problems on my theory test being based on it. It'd be hard to memorise stopping distances, although I think we do have to memorise approximate reaction time distances.
To me this is a sobering reminder of how much of real life is denied to American students in order to honor intellectual mediocrity, which is so widespread here that it might as well be a secular religion.
I wonder how many drivers realise that reaction times are not equal between drivers, and that attempting to include it within any estimations is futile because whilst I fiddle with my radio, or check my exquisitely coiffed hair in the rear view mirror, my reaction time is roughly that of my 95 year old grandmother.
I could go on?
The only truly accurate speed limit is one that which accounts for everything. Visibility, road conditions, brakes, tyres, alertness, time of day, type of road, skill of driver and probably 15 other things I haven't thought of in this little rant. Once this is accepted one can appreciate the most fundamental problem with speed limits - just because it says 60 on the sign doesn't mean that is a safe speed at which to drive.
Fixed speed limits are the only mechanic we have to try and keep people safe. A simple momentum equation tells 5% of the story.
Guess what? That is false. Car braking doesn't work the way you seem to think. Assuming the brakes take hold and the wheels aren't turning, a small, light car with four skinny tires, and a very large truck with 18 large tires, stop in the same distance.
When police investigate an accident, they have one braking-distance list that assumes level, dry pavement, but doesn't care about vehicle weight, tire size, number of tires, or anything else -- all those factors cancel out.
Wet pavement, pavement not level, yes, those are factors. Car size and weight, wheel count and tire area, not relevant.
There is a difference between shooting your neighbour because you disagree over loud music and standing in your garden and firing up to celebrate the superbowl win and the bullet comes down killing your neighbour. You should do time for both yes, but they are different crimes.
If he was driving 40mph, it would be an accident. At 80mph, it's murder. He made the premeditated decision to kill when he threw everything he knew about driving safely out the window and put the pedal to the metal. It's that simple.
This wasn't a freeway where he was going 80 in a 75 zone. It was a normal road with intersections and many other road users going the speed limit or below. It's simply idiotic to drive 80 there, and it's very easy to accidentally kill someone when you're going that fast. (You have no time to react.)
Driver's Ed is 6 months of you being told this every single day. He knew it was dangerous. He did it anyway. He killed someone. That's murder.
(Personally, I think 40mph is way too high of a speed limit for roads like this. 20mph would be a much better. Car/pedestrian collisions are much more survivable at that speed, and cyclists can move in and out of traffic freely. But 80mph is just fucking insane.)
He is saying that murder is a stretch.
The reason it became murder is because he was found to be boasting about his speeding behavior online, i.e. it wasn't episodic or unintended. He meant to go fast, he planned to go fast, and an 18-year-old is an adult with adult responsibilities -- whether or not he is ready for them.
Knowingly engaging in behavior that risky — driving faster than any posted speed limit in the entire United States of America on residential streets is egregiously risky — and thereby causing someone's death is textbook murder.
EDIT: phrasing.
-shrug-
Not that I'd particularly mind if that was resolved in favour of providing reasonably long prison sentences to people who commit truly awful driving offences. But either way.
I, on the other hand, don't think its ridiculous that homicide is, in fact, an element of the offense of murder.
> If intent's what matters then you've got to be consistent in that regard.
Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
> Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
I suspect we might just have an irreconcilable difference of framework in that respect:
I view the purpose of law to be to minimise the maximise the public good while causing the minimum restriction of freedoms. That being inherently a balancing act, freedom/security, the exact value of which is responsible for a lot of the problems with the actual application of law.
In that framework whether someone's acts resulted in death is dramatically less important than whether they were likely to, and whether the person who did it is likely to do so again unless restrained. (That their acts actually did lead to the death is evidence in favour of that class of act being more likely to lead to deaths than it would be without that bit of evidence, so in that sense it matters.)
Beyond that, whether someone dies or not, the drink driver and the speeder who didn't kill anyone but committed equally dangerous offences - they're all guilty of murder in the sense that matters to me. To borrow the way of phrasing it from the Christians: They've all already killed people in their hearts. It's just luck that no-one's dead for them, and luck's not a property of people, it's a property of limited knowledge; you can't rely on it.
In so far as we have knowledge, under such a system, if you lock the guy who actually killed people up, the rest should be locked up too.
1. It is per se ridiculous to consider driving at 40mph above (or double) the speed limit as an act involving reckless indifference to human life, regardless of the evidence supporting that, or 2. Evidence in the form of driving records and pre-offense statements by the driver could never suffice to support the consideration of such driving as involving reckless indifference to human life, or 3. That you have additional information about the specifics that is not in the article, and that information leads you to to conclusion that in this specific case, reckless indifference in unsupportable, or 4. It is per se ridiculous to consider reckless indifference sufficient mental state for murder, or 5. Something else.
Simply asserting that it is ridiculous is not an argument, and its the kind of contention that really needs an argument.
In general, attempt requires specific intent, even if the attempted crime does not. Murder is one of the few "common law crimes" where this matters, because most of them are already specific intent crimes anyway.
Killing -> misdemeanor manslaughter OR criminal negligence OR no malice -> involuntary manslaughter
Killing -> with malice -> no mitigation/justification/excuse -> murder
Killing -> with malice -> mitigation -> voluntary manslaughter
Killing -> justification/excuse -> nothing
I'm skipping felony murder for the sake of this post :)
You aren't really. You refer to malice. The four forms of malice in common law murder are: 1. Intent to kill, 2. Intent to cause grievous bodily harm, 3. Acting with reckless indifference to human life, 4. Commission of a felony
You are right that it is malice, but i didn't explain that part.
There really is no excuse for speeding. I think the figure of 30% of fatal car crashes are down to speeding.
Speed limits are there for a reason.
In particular, speeding is a norm in many places in the United States. If you are not going five to ten miles above the speed limit, people are likely to be actively passing you or driving too close behind you. I suspect it's safer to go five miles above the speed limit than have people constantly passing you because you're going slower than everyone else. (That said... I do wish speed limits were limits, and everyone followed them perfectly.)
No, that's not how murder is defined. Murder can include the result of a reckless indifference to the safety of others.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/murder
Quote: "The precise definition of murder varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Under the Common Law, or law made by courts, murder was the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. The term malice aforethought did not necessarily mean that the killer planned or premeditated on the killing, or that he or she felt malice toward the victim. Generally, malice aforethought referred to a level of intent or recklessness that separated murder from other killings and warranted stiffer punishment."
I draw your attention to "to a level of intent or recklessness", evidence for which which the defendant provided to the prosecution by boasting about his speeding behavior online.
Did the person consciously choose to drive 80? Yes. The gas pedal didn't get stuck. They didn't have a micro-stroke or go into diabetic shock. We know that they consciously chose to drive unsafely because they bragged about it.
Reasonably foreseeable outcome. Conscious, deliberate choice. Ergo: recklessness.
In German law that's even intent.
The weakest form of intent, and not always easy to distinguish from wanton negligence, but still.
We have all said stupid things in the past but should that all be held as evidence in judgement?
This particular example would be absolutely no different if he had written down "I really liked speeding today!" repeatedly on pieces of paper and put them on his fridge or whatever else would show intent.
Hence, unless you can establish beyond reasonable doubt that his tweets signaled his intent to hurt/maim/kill, it is hard to see how this should be allowed.
Different example: you are having a bad day today and someone overhears you muttering "I'm gonna knock someone out". Your coworker shows up shortly after sporting a black eye from when he slipped and fell earlier. Is it reasonable to assume you beat the crap out of him then?
It is, however, evidence of a state of mind that comprehends the speed limit and not only disregards it entirely, but does so deliberately.
The law calls that (among other things) "depraved indifference".
Similarly: imagine you got drunk at a friends apartment, picked up a rifle, and fired several rounds through the floor and into the apartment before (this happened with a friend of mine, now deceased). Imagine you killed someone. You clearly didn't intend to, but no reasonable person could fail to grasp the implication of firing a gun blindly into someone else's apartment. You were recklessly indifferent to the lives of the tenants below you, and have committed second-degree murder.
Driving 80 in a 40mph residential zone is no different from firing a gun blindly through the floor of a top-floor apartment. When my late friend did that, I'm sure he had no comprehension that he might have killed someone. Thankfully, he didn't.
It is impossible to have intent to commit vehicular manslaughter.
And he isn't being charged with a murder of an intent-to-kill type, he is being charged with murder of the type known as "depraved indifference", or, in the specific language of the California Penal Code, where malice is implied by "an abandoned and malignant heart". (Penal Code Sec. 188)
> Hence, unless you can establish beyond reasonable doubt that his tweets signaled his intent to hurt/maim/kill, it is hard to see how this should be allowed.
First, intent to hurt/maim/kill isn't an element of the crime he is being charged with, so it doesn't need to be proved at all; second, the tweets are not the only evidence being offered of the actual mental state relevant to the crime, so the tweets don't need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt by themselves; and third, whether the evidence proves a crime beyond a reasonable doubt is what we have juries for, we don't evaluate whether the evidence proves a crime beyond a reasonable doubt before deciding whether to allow a prosecution to proceed.
As others have said, intent is not an element that needs to be proved here, but the tweets (and "i really like speeding" on post-it notes on your fridge) would be direct evidence of reckless indifference.
Vehicular manslaughter is not an intentional crime (it's a negligent one in some states, and a reckless/grossly negligent one in others), so it's not possible to have intent to commit it.
(This also means attempted vehicular manslaughter is not a possible crime in most states)
If it was a slippery slope, we'd have slid the whole way down it long ago.
I still think he should be charged with murder though.
Moral education of the offender isn't the only purpose of criminal punishment.