He’s supposed to shoot the gun out of Cheney’s hands, of course.
It was a hunting accident. There was no “intent to kill or injure”. Was it carelessness? Maybe. Was it a natural lessening of awareness or reflexes due to age and/or medical problems? Maybe.
I’ll stick my neck out and say, Cheney probably was not drinking.
Well, it sure wasn’t a “peppering.” Cheney shot the living fuck out of Whittington. Put him in intensive care. I mean, Cheney really blew him away, considering he was only loaded with birdshot! He really blasted Whittington! I mean, BLAMMO!!! Whoo-eee!!! Mowed the man down!
As for the drinking, guess we’ll never know, since everyone there has every motivation to lie if he was, and the local cops weren’t allowed to talk to him for 24 hours.
If we assume that Cheny wasn’t drinking and wasn’t careless, was does that leave?
why are we outruling careless?
“I am…armed with knives…and trained to kill people.” “And I don’t think it’d surprise many Americans…to learn that I have…killed hundreds of people.” Or something along those lines from Letterman tonight.
Well, if Cheney did indeed “whirl to shoot a covey of quail”, as this link suggests, I think an arguement could be made that he was indeed “recklessly causing the death of an individual.” Then again, I’m no lawyer. Am I off base here?
All this debate about “intent” is crackin me up. Does anyone think that Cheney does his own dirty laundry? If Cheney wanted to kill a guy, anywhere near that guy is the last place you’d find him. Cheney’s innocence is proved by the fact that he pulled the trigger. If his intent had been to kill the guy, he’d’a been a thousand miles away, and ninjas woulda taken the guy quail hunting.
We’re not! I just hear some of the apologists suggesting that Cheney wasn’t being careless, and I’m thinking they might want to reconsider holding onto that excuse for a while longer. 
Moto, just because you don’t know something, don’t assume that the information is obscure. I have known about the death of that child since the mid-1960’s when Stevenson was the Ambassador to the UN. I have commented at SDMB about the sadness that he carried in his eyes. That was in spite of a totally mesmerizing personableness. And I have often wondered if that shooting was one of the sources of that haunted look. It would be of any man of heart and compassion and let no one doubt that he had that. There was no coverup or secretiveness about it since it is mentioned in all of his biographies.
Following up: turns out Katharine Armstrong is Anne Armstrong’s daughter.
More timeline, from the same article:
I think elelle has made an important point about the Secret Service. Maybe they couldn’t have prevented Cheney from shooting Whittington, but they had to be present: it’s hard to conceive that they would have let Cheney wander around a field with a group of people with loaded guns, without guarding him and making sure none of the other members of the hunting party shot him by accident.
And they’re witnesses, if need be, which I think is the significant point. Why rely on Katharine Armstrong’s storyline if you’ve got the freakin’ Secret Service having seen most of what went on?
Concerning alcohol: apparently now they’re saying that there was beer served not too long before the shooting, although MSNBC has scrubbed the story after initially reporting it. Screen grab from C&L.
IAAL, and tho it pains me to mitigate the liability of the prince of darkness, “reckless”, particularly if used to boost a negligent homicide to a more culpable level of manslaughter would be more like: cheney whirls, secret service man at his side says :“sir, hold your fire, i think i saw mr. W”, cheney snarls “go fuck yourself I know what I’m doing, he’s 10 degrees left of my bird”, etc.
Reckless conduct implies that you have “in contemplation” the particular risk that you are imposing on the hapless bystander,and, having that risk in contemplation (or, in the absence of the said contemplation, ignoring a risk that a reasonable person would contemplate)going ahead with the high risk conduct.
I think he was negligent, not reckless,on the facts (as described.)
If alcohol is added to the mix, however, there may well be statutary presumptions that intervene to raise the level of culpability as a matter of law.
I am blessedly ignorant of Texas law, but I’d bet that in general their firearms jurisprudence leans towards calling the close ones for the shooter…
come to think, re:my fantasy scenario involving the hypothetical exchange with the ss man, perhaps there was interaction with a ss man close by (per elelle’s musings) and he did try to intervene unsuccessfully which would mandate keeping the secret service away from questions…
Was there alcohol involved? Maybe we’ll never know. In it’s initial report, now only visible from a Google seach
But now, the MSNBC article found in the search has had the reference purged from the story.
So it appears that MSNBC, being the obedient dogs that they are, has rolled over for the White House. The news reports get sanitized and the police are kept away from the veep until the next day. If there wasn’t alcohol involved, why censor the report and why keep the cops away for a day? Sometimes it seems the White House bends over backward to appear crooked and/or incompetent.
brings up a couple interesting points about drinking.
(sorry if this angle has already been hashed out. I haven’t read the thread. )
Here’s an interesting WaPo story:
Cheney was shooting down at his quail? Towards lower ground? I’m no hunter, so correct me if I’m wrong, but that strikes me as a bad practice.
Hell, if the ground drops away in front of you, you ought to be able to fire towards open sky just by firing on the level; you wouldn’t even have to raise your gun barrel.
And in another vein, there’s this:
Well, here’s what they do if your name’s Mendoza, not Cheney:
They eventually dropped the charge, pending the outcome of a civil suit, but still: it looks like some Texas hunters get serious charges filed against them for accidental shootings.
Becase they have a long history lying to protect the person they are guarding. They protect not only the person but their reputation.
Slate publishes some questions Whittington’s friends are asking: who, if anyone, was in charge of the hunt (apparently standard practice is for a nonparticipant to direct the action, to make sure firing stops when the hunters get out of line); at what range was he hit (see quote below), and who was at fault (that’s not a question, really; their assumption is that if you shoot a hunting buddy instead of the bird, you’re the one at fault).
Can you document that?
And if it’s so, then it’s a practice that needs to be stopped. The Secret Service is there to physically protect the President, Vice-President, and their families, and unless called to testify, they’re required to keep their mouths shut - which is essential, I think, given that they’re a perpetual ‘fly on the wall’.
But if they’re going so far as to lie in one or more of those few situations where their testimony is needed - and I won’t believe it without a solid cite - well, the best way to deal with that is to swear them in, record their testimony as one would for any other witness, and charge them if there’s sufficient evidence that they’ve perjured themselves.