15-30 years for manslaughter with provocation. could someone quote worse crimes with a lower penalty for reference? if any?
We don’t know anything for sure, but her statement that she told the police was different and the physical evidence agreed with her original statement. Since she was left with her mother’s family and they were screaming for her father to be prosecuted for murder it would be pretty easy for them to implant the suggestion that her father had tried to murder her. If the physical evidence was consistent with her father strangling her bother and then trying to murder her and then stuffing her mother with pills and then beating her mother to death, then the prosecution would have gone for a double homicide.
And on the day of the crime:
Quotes from the OP’s link; bolding mine.
I understand it’s got to be tough if your spouse is dangerously insane. But ISTM he’d had plenty of time to rescue his children from this situation, but didn’t. And if not that, then he’d had plenty of time to think about the possibility that his wife might harm their children.
Having had that time, it was his responsibility to think about how to prevent it, or at least how best to respond if it happened. Instead, he left his crazy wife to do drugs with his friends. Brilliant.
AFAIAC, he’s fully responsible for his actions here. If any of this caught him by surprise, it certainly shouldn’t have. This wasn’t a bolt out of the blue.
Who cares? This is not how argument works. The philosophical question is “should a person who killed his wife for murdering their son get a lower penalty than a person who murdered a stranger in cold blood.” The question assumes the wife’s guilt. Saying “well maybe she didn’t do it/he did” is not a valid response, logically.
But I meant that the sister in law may not have been committing perjury if she wasn’t actually coaching those answers.
It’s just not reasonable to hold this against Smeltzer. He knew for a fact his son was dead, it certainly appeared his daughter was dead, and his wife was responsible and she was right there. What you’re saying in essence is that his behavior was irrational, and given what he was looking at, that’s not surprising.
Well, it’s not like I’m on the jury. In the grand scheme of things, my opinion will matter not a jot to Smeltzer.
I am not faulting him for behaving irrationally. I am faulting him for not behaving as I would expect - irrationally, but more strongly motivated to try to save his daughter, than beat his wife, who was no immediate threat (she was unconscious, right?). I know ‘she appeared to be dead’, but he didn’t check? He didn’t hope his little girl might still be alive and try to get her help? He just assumed she was dead?
That just does not make any sense, and not because it’s irrational. (Actually, it’s fairly rational, assuming if one child’s murder was completed, the other’s would have been.)
It the court considered that likely, it would explain the sentence – then, it wouldn’t truly be a case of maslaughter triggered by provocation, but rather a case of manslaughter triggered by voluntarily-caused bad judgment. The latter is obviously more dangerous (being more likely to recur if and when this guy is back on the streets).
I don’t think it’s reasonable to fault him for not doing what you would expect in a situation that’s so horrible it is hard to contemplate. It’s reasonable to fault him for leaving his mentally ill wife at home with their children so he could get high. I don’t think it’s reasonable to fault him for not being thorough in checking on his daughter, who looked dead, after seeing that his son was dead.
The link in the OP says she was “in the throes of a suicide attempt.” I have no idea what that means in practical terms.
Strange thread.
Yes, if you beat someone to death with a flashlight you should receive a custodial sentence. The circumstances should be taken into account, but they are no excuse.
People find themselves in terrible situations every day and manage to restrain themselves.
Alternatively, if we’re saying “You can’t imagine what it’s like…not everyone can necessarily handle that kind of rage” etc etc, then what exactly is the limit to what we should allow? If he kills everyone on his block because he’s in a mad rage and is sure that someone nearby killed his children, is that OK?
TBH I think this is more about some people’s tendency to seek retribution. “She had it coming”, so he must have done a good thing, right?
Like killing a guy who distributes child porn. That surely can’t be a crime.
Do you think there are there any circumstances where such a fatal beating should get a lighter sentence? Some people in this thread say yes, you’re implying no. I don’t see what’s fundamentally “strange” about this kind of disagreement.
Look, most people whose children are murdered don’t kill the perpetrators. His guilt is somewhat mitigated by the death of his son, but he’s a danger to society, plain and simple.
“Bobs a nice guy, but whatever you do don’t kill his kids!”
How many people whose children are murdered encounter the murderer red-handed? This story and circumstances seems very unique, but there may be other cases I’m not familiar with?
Just to add to the tragedy, my reading between the lines indicates that the mother’s family is poisoning the daughter against the father. Correct me if I’m misreading, but it seems that after staying with her maternal aunt the girl changed her story to claim her father killed her brother and that she hopes he rots in prison. Now that may be part of how she’s handling grief, but I’m very suspicious that her thoughts have had some adult influence.
Moral of the story - if you’re going to smoke crack with your buddies bring your wife along and hire a babysitter.
Most people probably don’t come upon the perpetrator in flagrante delicto.
Is that relevant? When I checked a while back it turned out that most small children are murdered by by their parents. This case is just another example. The only way they can kill the perpetrators is by committing suicide, which is quite common and what happened in this case. The unusual feature was that the mother wasn’t dead yet when the father came home. If he had just showed up a little later, murder would have been impossible because his wife would have already been dead.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174580/
http://www.publications.villanova.edu/Concept/2005/Filicide.pdf
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_02.html
This is the point that makes me think he should have gotten a shorter sentence. Not no sentence, not even a really light sentence, but less than what he actually got.
I don’t think this is the best argument/counterargument in this situation. There are two important issues that I see here: he left her alone with their children despite her delusions and mental health problems so he could do drugs, which, in my mostly-based-on-Law-&-Order-reruns view of the justice system might be enough to get him charged with negligence on its own, and he didn’t kill her in the process of trying to save their children (or himself), he found her evidently trying to kill herself and beat her to death with the flashlight. That may be understandable given the horror of what he saw and it may be an unusual circumstance, but it’s still killing a person and it’s seems to be the lightest possible sentence for that.
Does it change or commute his sentence if she actually was “in the throes of a suicide attempt”?
Overdose?
You’ve misread what I said there. I said should be taken into account meaning, yes, I think the sentence should be lighter given the circumstances (although other factors like the initial negligence might swing things the other way).
Lighter, that is, than a typical second degree murder sentence. 15-30 meaning, what, 10 years in jail with good behaviour…seems about the right fit compared to other crimes.
Not the disagreement, but how many people sound like they’re supporting this guy.
It reminds me of those trials you see in the ME or Africa, where a guy has beaten a homosexual to death, say, and he’s getting showed with rose petals, crowds cheering etc etc on the way to the court.