I think she probably went in prepared to shoot to someone and then did, whether in panic or rage. We’ll never know but I suspect that is more likely than her going in with an absolute certainty she would be shooting someone if she found them. If it had been a little old white lady with a walker eating ice cream, I think the odds are reasonable said little old lady would have survived unharmed.
Not that we’ll ever really know. Nor does it matter, particularly. She committed murder, case closed thankfully. I’d have given her more than ten years as well( probably not the max, I do believe in rehabilitation ), but the conviction is at least something. I honestly expected her to skate on a lesser charge, as with Johannes Mehserle.
At what point did she realize that she was in the wrong apartment? I read that while she was on the phone with 911 she texted her BF/partner, “I fucked up” & “come quick” so she had to know by then. Doing as you suggested once she realized the door mat & furniture wasn’t right would only worsen the situation & add a manufacturing/tampering with evidence charge, as well.
So does extreme drunkenness but neither absolves you of responsibility or an accusation of negligence. And I’m wondering what “extreme” means here. Lots of people pull double shifts without walking into the wrong apartment and killing people.
Right. There’s nothing that remarkable about her opening the door to the apartment immediately above hers by mistake. The remarkable (and criminal) thing was murdering the resident of that apartment.
I once had an extremely drunk guy try to open the door to my apartment, which looked like all the other units in the neighborhood. He, being a normal, non-murderous person, saw me come to the door, startled, realized his mistake, apologized, and left to find his apartment. And hey, I was standing and coming towards him, I wasn’t sitting on the couch eating ice cream. I’m sure some version of that happens somewhere in the US every day.
There was a case in Maryland recently where a drunk fellow tried to break into a house and was shot - he apparently wandered to the wrong house (he had been at a party at a nearby residence)
"According to Howard County police, around 1 a.m. Gerardo Espinoza, 46, of Chantilly, Virginia, who was not wearing shoes or a shirt began, banging on the door to a house in the 14000 block of Carriage Mill Road and demanding to be let in.
Police said footage taken by a security doorbell — which has not been made publicly available at this time — shows Espinoza threatening the residents, shouting “I’m going to f— you up,” and “You want a piece of this s—?”
The residents of the home, Charles Dorsey, 56, and his wife, repeatedly shouted at the man to leave and dialed 911.
Espinoza then tried to force his way into the house. In the video, police say Dorsey can be heard shouting, “He pushed the door open, he pushed the door open,” at which point Dorsey shot Espinoza once, killing him.
According to police, Espinoza had been staying at friend’s house in the neighborhood and may have been drinking before the incident. Detectives are looking into the possibility that Espinoza may have accidentally gone to the wrong house."
Prosecutors frequently charge people with a laundry list of charges related to a single event. Was she charged with other things (ie. trespassing, burglary {which I’ve heard of when they find a drunk sleeping it off in someone’s bed}, weapons offenses, etc.) & if so, what were the outcome of the relatively minor charges?
I don’t care what she believed, because it’s irrelevant. A reasonable person would not break into another person’s apartment and believe it’s their own, period. Being stupid enough to ‘mistake’ other people’s apartments and shoot them is not and should not be a defense for murdering them. This is especially true for agents of the government, who should be held to a higher standard, not allowed to murder people with ‘welp, I had an accident’.
Do you think that if a black guy entered her apartment believing it was his own and shot and killed her, that he’d really get a slap on the wrist like ten years? He’d be lucky not to be ‘shot while resisting’ at the scene, and they certainly wouldn’t search her apartment to leak stories about how they found drugs. No one would be saying ‘well, he really believed the white cop’s apartment was his own, so we should let him off easy’, they’d be painting him as some kind of deranged animal or hallucinating drug user.
The level of cognitive dissonance required to argue both that she was such a breathtakingly mentally incompetent human being that she thought someone else’s apartment was hers and shouldn’t be held fully accountable for killing the rightful occupant, but also that since her attempt at a coverup can be considered ‘lousy’ and ‘half-hearted’ that it doesn’t count as one is pretty impressive. The fact that her partner (who she texted instead of attempting to save the life of her victim) didn’t go along with it, and that her obvious lies about the situation (like making claims contradicted by forensic evidence) didn’t convince anyone to fully let her off doesn’t mean that she didn’t lie or attempt to cover up the situation.
It is never legitimate to break into someone’s apartment and shoot them. The idea that you can break into someone’s house, kill them, then claim that you thought they were the burglar because ‘oh, the floors in this building look similar’ is sick enough of it’s own, and even worse when applied to an LEO who is allowed much more leniency in entering people’s homes and using force against them.
Excusing her choice to text her partner in an attempt to cover up the crime instead of attempting to mitigate what you’re calling an ‘accident’ because with hindsight we know it would have been futile simply doesn’t work.
She couldn’t legally break into a man’s house and shoot him, but that didn’t stop her. The belief that someone who’s willing to violate laws about murder will be absolutely stopped by firearms laws makes no sense to me, especially in light of how many of her fellow LEOs openly supported her actions. Notably, Sgt David Armstron of the Texas rangers was prepared to testify that not only did he believe her breaking and murdering was fine, he believed police had no probable cause to even arrest her. I don’t think she will have any problem acquiring a firearm from various right-wing groups that cheer her actions, or with getting cops to look the other way if it gets noticed.
TL;DR. I’m unclear on what factors make this murder (at least under Texas law) rather than manslaughter. Ten years sounds reasonable for the latter but not the former.
It’s because of Texas law defining these words in ways they are not defined elsewhere.
In Texas, manslaughter is by definition killing a person by accident, but in an egregiously recklessly criminal manner. Deliberately killing someone isn’t manslaughter. It’s always “murder,” unless it meets the definitions to be upgraded to “Capital murder.”
Guyger killed Jean on purpose, so was not guilty of manslaughter, but of murder. She might have entered his apartment accidentally but the act of killing him was deliberate. If, for instance, she had been in her apartment and decided to have fun shooting holes in the floor, and hit and killed him by accident, that would be manslaughter.
Texas’s way of defining these words is not common, so far as I can tell. In Canada, for instance, Guyger would almost certainly have been convicted of what Canada calls “manslaughter,” because the offence covers acts that Texas’s offence of “murder” covers. The State of New York defines first degree manslaughter in an entirely different way, whereby the intention to harm the person must be clearly intentional, but it cannot be proven the person intended to actually cause death. In California, non-vehicular manslaughter can be voluntary or involuntary, and the voluntary version is what Amber Guyger did.
The Texas law on “murder” then allows for a lot of sentencing latitude based on the circumstances. Guyger’s sentence was based on 19.02(d) applying which states that “Sudden passion” may be invoked to reduce the charge to a second degree felony for sentencing purposes, but it’s still “murder.”
So you’re saying that Texas law lumps under the word “murder” what a lot of other jurisdictions would call second or third degree murder, manslaughter, depraved indifference, etc. That makes somewhat more sense. ETA: does that mean that under Texas law even defensive killings require a clear affirmative defense, as opposed to some where the burden is on the state to show the difference between homicide and manslaughter/murder.
I agree, I don’t think she would’ve shot everyone and everything she found. If she encountered a Vietnamese family of 6 she might have stayed her trigger finger long enough to ask questions (maybe not, but hopefully yes). I do think she entered with the intent to shoot Jean or anyone else she could quickly stereotype as a criminal as I can’t explain her actions any other way.
My wife (a lawyer) said what cinched it was that when she was questioned whether she intended to kill Jean, and she said yes. Had she not said yes, then she probably would have qualified for manslaughter, as it wasn’t deliberate.
While I can’t speak for him, this does come across as assuming everyone involved in the trial and prosecution is white, racist, and willing to do anything to make sure she was acquitted. It’s one thing to assume prejudice and racism are factors for the jury but your statement appears to go a bit beyond that.
IMO, your statement doesn’t ping the racist bell but I could see where it would for someone else.
Not necessarily. Alternatively, there is the part of the code that reads:
“The defendant intended to cause serious bodily injury and committed an act that was clearly dangerous to human life and this act caused the death of an individual”
Which she did. By intentionally shooting him. Whether she meant to kill or not, shooting someone is clearly dangerous to human life, and she intended to do it knowing it would result in severe bodily injury at least.
In fairness, had she said no, the jury would likely have not believed her, and would have then been likelier to disbelieve everything else the defense said.