I don’t think anybody is saying he shouldn’t be punished, but 1st degree murder is different and more serious than 2nd degree murder. Reserved for people who plant bombs, plan and execute a murder, or kill during the comission of a felony, not for some brain dead boob who thinks dropping rocks on cars is fun.
If I felt that this idiot was thinking “Gee, if I drop this just right… I’ll turn some lady’s head into mush!” then I’d be happy with 1st degree. I doubt that was the thought process, he was probably thinking he’d fuck up someone’s car or make someone swerve and maybe crash. If you’re not planning to kill, I don’t think you should get 1st degree. I don’t think this guy thought that he’d kill someone with his moronic stunt.
Will it? I can’t imagine that the “people who read the news, follow criminal trials, and remember court decisions” and the “people who throw large rocks from bridges” demographics overlap all that much.
What I don’t get is, why haven’t the various states already made specific laws to cover this kind of thing? It should be a serious crime to cause death or bodily harm to people by throwing things at vehicles, or dropping things on vehicles. It isn’t as if this is a new fad, it’s been going on for at least twenty years that I can recall. It is being reported more frequently, but I can remember hearing about people getting hurt or killed by jerks thowing rocks/bricks off overpasses back in the '80s. Of course, the law needs to be a bit specific in that water balloons aren’t as serious as a brick, and a tomato is somewhere inbetween the two because it can obscure the windsheild and that might cause a wreck. Why haven’t the legislators drawn something up, so that such crime can be punished, and so that idiots can’t say “Well, there’s no law against it, so it’s just harmless fun!”
Thinking about it, I’ll amend my thoughts a bit. Water baloons filled only with water and thrown in non freezing conditions aren’t as serious as a brick. If they have paint, or some other substance, or it’s freezing that might be different.
Around here at Halloween time you’ll see a police car parked on each overpass to try prevent this type of tragedy. It seems the kids think it’s funny to haul pumpkins over the side onto the highway below. Dumbasses. :mad:
Because there’re at least a dozen laws you could prosecute someone under, so be assured there’s no chance anyone who gets caught will walk away easily. Don’t fix what’s not broken.
If there is no problem, why are people in this thread arguing about what kind of punishment the people in the article linked by the OP should get? Making the law I proposed would clear up the confusion over what kind of punishment should be meted out, and what kind of crime it is.
Even being generous and assuming a crash was what the idiot wanted, I’d say the intent to kill was evident.
This situation is identical to firing a shotgun into a crowd, and the intent to kill wouldn’t even be in question, there.
Well, considering that one of the idiots confided in an aunt only after hearing about the woman’s death, I would disagree that killing was the intent. Mayhem, for sure, but I don’t think they really intended to kill. But that’s all opinion anyway.
At any rate, I wouldn’t argue against 2nd degree murder for this, it’s the concept of calling a rock a “destructive device” in an effort to make it 1st degree that chafes my ass. A rock isn’t a device, it’s about as far from a device as you can get, it’s a rock for chrissake.
Me too. Youth in particular are just not known for their brilliant decision making skills. How many other people do the same idiotic things and purely by chance get away with it (ie it doesn’t end in tradgedy). Although the consequences are by no means similar, it reminds me of teenagers who get pregnant and ostracised (maybe not so much nowadays), when they are just the unlucky ones - thousands of others are having unprotected sex, ie doing the same thing, but purely due to chance, don’t get pregnant.
Perhaps the thinking was that a falling rock was akin to a destructive device, in the sense of putting into motion an inevitable series of events which may or may not result in a death. They might not have meant a rock, in the hand, directed with muscular motive force.
Then again, guns could be said to do the same thing, so who knows?
Well, if you look over the history of this board, and people’s attitudes to crime and punishment generally, you’ll see that people will always argue over things like this, no matter how specific the laws get.
Making a specific law for every possible variation of criminal activity seems a rather pointless task. A map of the world as big as the world becomes a useless tool.
In a case dating to January 2003, a 15 year old kid dropped an 18 pound chunk of ice from an overpass in Whitehall, PA. The ice struck a van traveling the highway beneath the overpass and killed the female front seat passenger. The perpetrator was convicted of third degree murder.
Sorry if my views seem harsh, but anyone who can’t fathom that dropping shit onto a highway from an overpass has a strong likelihood of causing danger to life and limb is too fucking stupid to be walking the streets and needs to be incarcerated for their own and society’s protection.
Yeah, i know that the justice system needs, at some level, to take into account people’s motivations when deciding charges and punishment. But it seems to me that dropping heavy objects off a freeway overpass has pretty much no purpose except to cause trouble for the traffic below. And causing trouble for traffic travelling at 60+ miles an hour means a high likelihood that someone will end up dead.
Even if the intent is not to kill, the danger is so blatantly obvious that i really have no sympathy for someone who is put away for a very long time. It’s sort of like firing a gun into a crowd for fun and then arguing that you never meant to hurt anyone.
Oh, I didn’t say I had any sympathy for him. Just that I think it’s a dangerous precedent to be setting, and certainly one which is not in tune with the written legal code. This has nothing with him not being an idiot (whcih he is).
You think that´s bad?
Some years ago some… not-people, threw a rock from an overpass to an interstatal bus, the driver was injured and lost control of the bus that proceeded to make a couple rolls along the road; there where people thrown all over the place, a few death, some grave injuries and others just shocked. So what did those non-people do when they saw the scene?, they looted the luggage holds of the bus.
I agree with you that it wasn’t intentional murder. And there was a great deal of stupidity involved. But I don’t think it can be dismissed that way. There was clearly malicious intent. They might not have meant to kill, but they surely meant to damage, possibly injure. It was a vicious action, even if it wasn’t meant to be a fatal one. You don’t do such a thing without some knowledge that it can be harmful, and I would bet that that was part of the “fun”.