Suppose I’m in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with one other person. An annoying person. One of those people you can’t punch just once. So one day, I decide I’m sick and tired of him, so I bash him over the head with an oar and kill him.
Can i be prosecuted for murder? And who has jurisdiction?
For sake of argument, assume when I’m rescued I mention the killing.
Assuming the lifeboat was launched from a registered vessel, the state whose flag it carried will have jurisdiction. Your own government will likely have jurisdiction. The victim’s government will probably have jurisdiction. Who gets to prosecute you will be a matter of what treaties the relevant governments are signatories to (or who finds you first, in the absence of one.)
This may relate to The Custom of the Sea in which it was accepted that starving sailors, adrift in a boat, could kill and eat one of the party in order to survive. The story of the Mignonette is the last example of a trial relating to this.
The full story is fascinating: http://www.nmmc.co.uk/images/uploads/The%20Mignonette1.pdf
They were eventually found guilty and sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to 6 months in prison.
This scenario sort of happened to one of my high school friends. A decade or so after graduation, he was on a sailboat with two friends in the south Pacific. Only one person was on board when the ship got to some island there; not sure on the details, I heard the story long ago - but apparently one of them went crazy, threw another overboard, then either threw or was thrown overboard by the other.
The authorities on the island (French department, IIRC) investigated the story and didn’t lay charges. But if they did, I suppose it would involve some sort of piracy or similar law of the sea offenses?
It doesn’t relate to the custom of the sea at all. The OP is talking about killing someone because he feels like it, not because he needs to eat them to survive. Anyway, the point of the case (R. v. Dudley & Stephens) is that sailors couldn’t eat each other anymore.
I believe the other poster was referring to a piece of fiction, a book, rather than actual custom.
No - the Mignonette was the boat that Dudley and Stephens (and their erstwhile victim’s remains) were in. And Custom of the Sea is the name given to the body of “sailor’s law” that included the principle that you could eat each other if shipwrecked.
An interesting sidelight: The name of the victim, Richard Parker,was the source of the name of the tiger in Life of Pi (along with another fictional victim of cannibalism in an Edgar Allen Poe story).
Clarification: the point of the case was that sailors couldn’t kill and eat each other anymore. It was okay to eat those who died of natural causes.
Your thread title references “getting away with” murder. If you want to get away with murder in the referenced hypothetical, then the best option is just to call it something else. Absent witnesses or cameras, nobody will be able to prove otherwise. History is written by the victor. Any oceanic murderer lacking the intelligence to invent a “convenient accident” will have the book thrown at him.
OK, I will share with you the method. (I’m only doing this because Brian Kalt spilled the beans back in 2005).
Start with the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “…the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and the district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”
Now consider Yellowstone National Park. In 1872, Congress created the Yellowstone National Park as a “federal enclave,” not subject to state law. In 1889 and 1890, Congress admitted Idaho and Wyoming into the Union; each state’s boundaries included part of Yellowstone. But Congress placed the entire Yellowstone National Park into the jurisdiction of the US District Court for Wyoming.
So: lure your victim into the Idaho portion of Yellowstone, and shoot them dead.
Now wait calmly for your arrest and indictment. Then point out, with a devilish grin, that the Sixth Amendment requires your jury be drawn from the state (Idaho) and the federal district (Wyoming) where the crime occurred. Your jury members must live in the Yellowstone National Park, in the Idaho area.
And no one lives there. So, no jury can try you, and you can walk away without consequences.
(Hopefully the humorous tone of the above is evident: in real life I do not represent any such legal conclusion to be correct).
Anyone interested can read Kalt’s piece via SSRN.
But don’t kill anyone I know.
NM
Sure they can. The Federal District of Wyoming empanels a jury drawn from registered voters in the district, irrelevant of where they live, and the judge shoots down your spurious defense as frivolous. I assume you’d have your mouthpiece make a motion to dismiss or acquit based on jury selection? I hope you have a backup plan.
Or, like in the Bernie Tiede trial, the prosecution is able to get a change of venue because it’s impossible to draw an impartial jury from the residents of Yellowstone.
The point is the the jury must be drawn from the district AND the state, not the district OR the state. If you simply draw from Wyoming, you have not drawn from the appropriate state. If you draw from Idaho, you have not drawn from the appropriate district.
In real life, the question has never been answered, because nobody lives there so the number of crimes committed there (and caught by police) is low.
Why in the world would you ever tell anyone you had a companion ?
Note to self: don’t see* Life of Pi*.
I bet that since it’s a federal crime, the prosecutor could get a change of venue to just about anywhere in the US. Your appeals might go all the way to the Supreme Court, at which point, they’d either rule that you had a fair and legal trial (assuming you are convicted), or they will make some other ruling that will provide for a retrial with a jury that will pass muster during your next set of appeals.
This will take both a lot of time and a lot of money, and during that time, whatever prosecutor is in charge will offer you tempting plea bargains that would probably have you out on parole before your case was through all its appeals and your new trial date was set, in spite of the fact that if there was ever a clear case of first degree murder with malice and planning, this would be it.
You would lose that bet. Particularly since a federal prosecutor cannot even ask for a change of venue.
That’s not what I meant, but now that I think about it, I realize what I did mean was probably wrong-- would this be in the jurisdiction of a federal prosecutor?