with all the stray bullets flying around this country, you would think that just one could find its way into this guys eye socket…
Suppose that John loses the use of his legs, and therefore cannot exercise, and as a result dies of cardiac arrest at age 75 instead of cancer at 85.
Or suppose that the surgeon working on John leaves a sponge inside him, and John gets sepsis and dies.
OK, this could get very silly very soon. It just seems odd to me that doctors could choose to terminate the girl’s life, and therefore change the nature of Strickland’s crime. Killa girl, get a better conviction. It seems like the cart pulling the horse.
You’re not going to be able to prove legal causation.
Independent intervening cause? Or a foreseeable consequence of George’s actions (i.e., it’s foreseeable that this would happen to John, so George must bear the consequences).
Doctors aren’t terminating her life; they’re recognizing that she’s already dead, and that the withdrawal of life support simply will permit people to recognize her death.
I’ll stop there, lest I (again) hijack a perfectly good pitting to wax eloquent about a finer point of law that’s interesting only to me.
It’s not like the doctors would be actively doing anything. The girl stopped breathing as an immediate consequence of the beating. She has irrepairable brainstem damage as an immediate consequence of the beating.
She will never regain consciousness, never breath on her own, and never swallow another bite of food or water. She’s dead. She’s been murdered.
Having a plethora of machines and support workers going 24 hours a day to keep her body hydrated, her blood oxygenated, and her stomach full, and attempting to move the body frequently enough to minimize muscle death isn’t keeping a human being alive – it’s maintaining an integrated collection of tissue cultures.
You’ve hit on the distinction between actual cause and proximate cause as it pertains to criminal law. In each of the hypos you describe, the assaults resulting in John’s injury would be an actual cause of John’s death, but a prosecutor also has to prove “proximate cause” (also called “legal cause” as Campion says), which refers how far back the prosecutor can go in the chain of events to say whether or not the defendant’s actions can be considered the legal cause of the decedent’s death. Generally, proximate cause has to do with how foreseeable the death was from the nature of the injury. The common law answer to your first question would be that no murder took place because the person did not die within one year and one day of his injuries (the so called “year and a day” rule), but that has been abrogated by statute in many states and the rule will vary. The answer in most (probably all) jurisdictions, though, will be that an assault that eventually causes a general health decline in the victim’s twilight years won’t be murder.
The answer to your second question will (as usual) vary, this time on which law the state uses regarding medical malpractice as an intervening or superceding cause of death. Generally the rule is either that medical malpractice does not absolve one who causes another serious bodily injury of crminal liability even if the malpractice contributes to the death, that only gross negligence that constitutes the sole cause of death will absolve criminal liability, or that a jury must decide whether the malpractice was foreseeably within the risk of death caused by the defendant. It’s a complicated question.
Don’t worry, you’re not the only law nerd in the thread.
Well, it looks like I’m getting quite a legal education here! This is good stuff.
So for all intents and purposes, the girl is dead, or as good as. Does it matter then in Strickland’s case whether the doctors withhold life support? If they do not, would this benefit Strickland in any way?
The link requires registration, so I"m left w/just the quotes shown here.
from the sound of it, the dead woman is more likely to be responsible for the childs injuries than Mr. Strickland. While I personally would not hit w/a plastic stick, twice w/an open hand, once w/ a plastic stick is, I suspect what many folks would consider to be routine discipline of a child. so, unless the article has more suggestion of evidence of his wrong doing, I’d not be so quick to call him a murderer etc.
it is entirely possible for one parent to be abusive and not the other.
Here is a link from MSNBC about this case, and one from the NY Times which has a picture of the girl. How long before the people who rallied behind Terri Shiavo’s parents come out of the woodworks I wonder? Or is the stepfather not charismatic enough to sway them?
The irony of the oft-stated sentiment, “The first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers” (Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene II) is that the complaintants were conspiring to overthrow the king. Similarly, those who wish to dispense with the law entirely, or remove its protections, even from the most vile of defendants, embrace the kind of relativist nihilism that would serve only to increase the incidence of this type of thing.
The individual in question–one certainly cannot refer to him as a gentleman, and indeed, it is difficult to even think of him as a human being–deserves a competent and vigorous defense. He also deserves to spend the rest of his miserable existance in a dank cell with only elephant snot and stagnant pond water to sustain him. We can but hope that the prosecution, with the ample if likely circumstantial evidence possessed, can place this…creature…in a state of perpetual incarceration.
As for the incident itself, it is utterly galling, but it is also likely far more common than most suspect. Growing up, I lived in a relatively backward and lower-blue-collar area in one of those states in Top 40 purgatory; foster families, abandoned children, and the like were common. Some were good and caring, which is even more astonishing considering the emotional condition and background that many foster children are in when they are delivered, but many were clearly doing it for the money, and children were often abused by foster parents, other foster siblings, et cetera, and the system did little (and probably couldn’t do much better) to protect the children under their aegis.
Not that natural families are necessarily better, or that Family Services/Child Protective Welfare/whatever respond any better. I had a classmate–not a close friend but a girl who I’d known since first grade–who as it turned out was being molested–really, raped–by her father on a regular basis. When this was discovered–sometime between suicide attempt #2 and #3–he was arrested, tried, convicted, given probation or a suspended sentance…and then, when she left the hospital, she was placed back in the some with this by all accounts unrepentant waste of oxygen, who no doubt continued to have his way with her.
It happens; sometimes, the best you can do is not let it happen to anyone you know.
Stranger
I think that the argument is that he was complicit in the baseball-bat beating – he was present during it and did nothing to try to stop it, and in fact was striking her during it.
I’m sure that the lawyerly types will be able to elaborate, but as I understand it that makes him liable to be charged with her murder, even if he didn’t strike the fatal blow. He is alleged to have been an active participant in the assault.
To begin with, I don’t think he’s going to have standing to contest the state’s decision to remove life support. Best I can tell is that he’s a stepfather with no parental rights, and suffice to say he’s not in any position to try to gain and assert them.
Mind you, I don’t fault his attorney for making the argument, but sheesh, lotsa luck with that one. If Terry Schiavo’s parents couldn’t intervene, what does this guy’s think his chances are? I’d like to see the righteous indignation of the state’s attorney as he raves over the magnificent set of balls, the balls the petitioner must have to argue this one.
Now, as to his chances of a murder conviction that sticks after she is removed from life support (assuming arguendo that he did in fact cause her injuries), that’s the kind of thing that lawyers write 10,000 word “briefs” over, but my purely gut instinct is no way is he walking away from her death without a murder conviction.
I understand if he stood by and watched it happen. Point I was making was that there was nothing in the MSNBC article that indicated he was guilty of anything other than being married to a monster and using slightly more harsh disciplin than the average person (I’m not sure the average person would hit w/a plastic stick. I’m certain that it’s not at all uncommon to slap w/open hand). there was nothing in the article that suggested that he was present when the woman beat the child w/a bat.
The sitter may indeed have said that to the cops. in which case, sure, fine, I agree. HOwever the quote from the article didn’t indicate that. and unless there was a witness to him standing by and watching, I’m not sure how they’d establish it.
I fear that since the woman who had been witnessed as to beating the child is dead, there may be some level of “somebody’s gotta pay” and “Surely he must have known”, neither of which, IMHO justifies a prosecution.
The courts will decide what is in the best interests of the child. That will most likely mean withdrawal of life support- that is not euthanasia or murder or anything else- it is allowing nature to take it’s course.
Then I hope that the man in question receives a fair trial and is convicted or aquitted based on the evidence available.
After that I trust that there is an afterlife and a just God to sort it all out properly.
As far as the school thing goes: it is absolutely amazing how convincingly a child can “fake” normal–or reasonably weird–when they are convinced that not letting anyone know about home is a life-or-death matter.
What a horrible case. I hope that something positive can come out of it - at the very least it should result in an improvement in the child protection services.
Other than that, what Irishgirl said.
That’s the way I see it. I don’t think most people understand that modern medical technology is increasingly making it possible to keep people’s bodies operating long after the lights have gone out for good in the brain.
As an atheist, I don’t believe there are gonna be any Great Sky Fairies to sort it all out after death. I think we have to do a better job on this sort of stuff. Part of this involves getting rid of the mystical mindset regarding parents. As this girl’s family illustrates, just because you have a family, it doesn’t mean they should be raising you. Some people are not fit to care for others. Maybe we’ll be able to sort them out before things get to this stage, someday.
Child protection services are always walking a very thin line. If they take the kids away with unsufficient evidences, they’re damned. If they don’t and something goes wrong, there will always be someone pointing at hints that should have alerted them, and they’re damned too.
When was the last time you heard child protection services actions being praised in the medias? Each time they’re mentionned, they’re receiving flak for what did, didn’t do, should have done, shouldn’t have done. That’s an extremely important and difficult job (imagine the shit they’ve to deal with), but contrarily to other similar ones (say, teacher, police officers, etc…), a completely unrewading one. They’re saving and protecting thousands of kids, and they only get to be at best criticized and at worst hated by everybody.
I’d like to note, in passing, that the term “plastic stick” covers a fairly extensive amount of ground. It can be applied equally well to a swizzle stick and the solid-plastic baseball bat my dad’s Little League team uses when the weather is particularly heinous. (Yeah, the plastic bat isn’t as good as the metal and wood ones, but it rains 300 days a year in my home town and the wood ones get soggy while the metal ones have a regretable tendancy to slip out of one’s grip if everything is wet enough - especially if the bat-swinger is a soaking wet and fairly chilled nine-year old).
Also, it’s at least arguably within the scope of a depraved indifference sort of murder conviction to hang around with your thumb up your butt while someone else in your household kicks an eleven-year old down the stairs and/or beats her with a baseball bat. This is assuming he wasn’t personally engaging in greivous bodily harm of the child, which seems unlikely to me.
psssssst… Campion… I was interested.
I’m sure you’re correct on that, but it doesn’t really answer my question. And maybe you don’t have the answer. I’m OK with it if you don’t.
But I’ll re-ask it: Let’s suppose, but some long stretch of credibility, that Stickland manages to keep Haleigh on life support indefinitely, or at least through the trial. No, it won’t happen, but let’s pretend just for the moment. Would it have some sort of impact on his conviction and/or sentencing? Is there any way he would get a lighter sentence? Conversely, is there any way he could be convicted of murder, even though the girl is still metabolizing?