Unfortunately courts of law aren’t about the truth, but about convincing a group of people one particular version of events is most likely to have happened.
It may very well turn out to be that he killed her in cold blood, and gets away with murder, or that he made a terrible mistake, and serves time for murder.
This is a grossly inappropriate comparison to the case at hand.
Suppose instead that your driving acquaintance was alone in the car. Arriving home at dusk, he sees a person in his driveway. He takes this to be someone threatening him, the object in the figure’s hand a weapon. So he deliberately runs them down. Then he discovers, alas, it was actually his best friend, with a cell phone.
That is an analogous situation, to the “accident” scenario for Pistorius.
Maybe you can argue that Pistorius merits less time if there was a mistaken identity, but surely he deserves prison either way. How can failing to identify your targets before killing them not be seen as deeply criminal recklessness, at best?
+1 to OP. He pulled the trigger without positively identifying his target. This kind of negligence cannot be allowed. That’s one of the responsibilities inherent in gun ownership.
Well, we don’t even know his intent then. Did he intend to kill the person, or wound the person? If he didn’t know it was ‘her’ then he didn’t intend to ‘kill her’, he intended to kill a random burglar. Or wound a random burglar.
He did deliberately point the gun, and pull the trigger, but, we don’t know the rest.
Do you believe an accidental car killing should receive the same punishment as an accidental gun discharge? Vehicle ownership is a serious responsibility. Do you see the ‘whoops’ as being a mitigating factor?
I concur 100% with this. Any effing retard should know better than that.
I cannot equate it with ‘murder’ as the anti-gun lobby would have, but, I would put it at criminal negligence, or some such, and lock this idiot away for some time.
gwendee, you are encouraging that kind of behavior.
Let me see…“woman in house with a gun…yes, that’s the ticket! I’ll sneak in thru the window!”
I think the court should have desecrated the corpse, as well.
It’s not just the “anti-gun lobby.”
Are you saying that the woman was not murdered, just “the victim of negligence?”
“As a society we should not accept that it’s possible to shoot someone by accident. You can’t shoot someone by accident. Having a gun means you’ve already taken several deliberate steps towards shooting someone”
That’s utter nonsense. Aside from statistics which exist and media reports we have all read or seen of accidental shootings, I can certainly say that I have had and fired guns neither of which actions were “deliberte steps towards shooting someone” and that indeed, I have fired guns countless times in the presence of others without the intent of harming anyone - Ive been successful at that too.
There are a lot of different kinds of mistakes, so a lot of the examples and distinctions being suggested here aren’t all that relevant. And we don’t know that this was a mistake. The police are saying they never suggested he mistook her for a burglar and they noted that there’s a history of domestic disturbances. We don’t know where or how she was shot, so nobody knows if that theory is remotely plausible.
Isn’t “string him up” a synonym for “hang?” “String him up and hang him” would be double jeopardy.
anybody got any string?
How about if you string him up and let him back down instead of leaving him hanging.
The string him up action is absolutely seperate from the hanging. You can’t hang someone from the ground without string them up, but the converse is not so.
He’ll present a defense at trial, but it won’t help, because he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Excuse me. The antecedent was ‘anybody’ who shoots without knowing who/what they’re aiming at, not this particular case.
I haven’t read anything about this guy.
So some guy comes into my bedroom wearing a stocking over his head, and I’m not allowed to (stab/shoot/pummel him with a baseball bat) until I can turn on the lights, pull off the stocking, and identify him?
Interesting sense of justice you have there.
This thread will run and run and run…
You are about 6 hours too late for that joke.
I hadn’t read that she had a stocking over her head.
The house was in a guarded (we’d call it “gated”) community in South Africa. Perhaps he mistook his very blonde girlfriend for one of the folks kept locked out…