I was reading recently about a homicide case in Taiwan where one person was attacked by many assailants and eventually died.
This made me wonder a legal question: Suppose - for sheer logical extreme’s sake - that a victim was stabbed 1,000 times - one stab apiece inflicted by 1,000 different mob assailants - and died.
In the United States, would every single one of those 1,000 assailants be individually guilty of homicide in their own right?
If so, what would be the likely sentence for each of them? Locking up 1,000 people for life is impractical.
In general, the primary responsible party the “principal in the first degree” of murder would be the one person or multiple persons whose stab wounds were mortal. The other people present and assisting would be “principals in the second degree” but it just so happens that in most (all?) states they are just as guilty as the principals in the first degree.
If they were not present, but knew and assisted those principals, they would be accessories before the fact, and again, just as guilty as the principals. In short, all 1,000 are guilty of first degree murder.
Back when lynching was a popular American pastime — and certainly not only of black people — the masses were rarely charged, if anybody at all was charged in an incident. With the Brooke Hart Kidnapping in the 1930s The People took a spontaneous democratic revolutionary act and stormed the Santa Clara jail to hang the two killers.
No-one was charged, partly because there were thousands of murderers. And who wants that kind of trouble ?
The Governor of California commended the act; Hoover disapproved; Roosevelt was placatory; Jackie Coogan tied the knot.
It is? Why? We have 1.5 million people in federal and state prisons. Why would another 1000 make a difference? They don’t all have to go to the same prison.
I think it would depend on the jurisdiction. In the 1990s, I was on a jury for a murder trial in Massachusetts. As it happened, everyone knew that the defendant in the trial had not personally killed the victim. He might or might not have been part of a group that was present when the murder occurred during the commission of an unrelated crime. The question at issue was whether the defendant was actually present with the group, because, under Massachusetts law at the time, everyone who was there was technically guilty of the murder. So the defense said he wasn’t there, and the prosecution tried unsuccessfully to prove that he was.
So, under that law, I’d think that if 1000 people individually stabbed a victim once each, all of them would be seen as guilty, not just the one whose stab actually killed the victim.
Oh, wow. I thought you were just being clever but - man, that is an awful cover. I bet that painting is called, “Andre the Giant Forgets Where He Parked”.
A bystander, no. A part of the group that committed a felony, yes. That’s why the guy who drives the getaway car is just as guilty of the crime even if he never leaves the car.
Yes, this exactly. In the case I cited, there was a group of guys who were supposedly going to the victim’s house to do a drug transaction. But one of the leaders of the group went there intending to kill the victim, and did so. The guy who pulled the trigger wasn’t the defendant in the trial that I was on, but one of the guys allegedly in the group at the time was. However, the DA couldn’t prove to our satisfaction that our defendant was there on the occasion of the killing, even though he had admittedly been with the group doing drug business there on other occasions. In fact, most of us on the jury were pretty well convinced that he had *not *been there for the killing. So we acquitted him on all the major charges, but convicted him on lesser violations (illegal weapons possession, and I think a minor drug charge, IIRC). He got off with time served. But if he had been there at the time of the killing as part of the group intending to perform an illegal transaction, he would have been just as guilty of murder under Mass. law as the guy who pulled the trigger was.
I am not familiar with Mass. law, and I stand to be corrected, but I find it hard to believe that this is a correct statement of the law. Let me outline a hypo just to make sure I have it right:
Me, you, Bricker, and RNATB all like to smoke marijuana. I say, “Hey, I know a guy that has some good weed. I’ll drive. Let’s go up to his house to buy some.”
Now, unbeknownst to you three, I want to go to the guy’s house to shoot him in the head, steal his cash and marijuana. The three of you are only coming along for the marijuana purchase.
The guy opens the door, I shoot him, and you three look at me in stunned silence.
First, is that the hypo? If so, there is no way that you three are guilty of murder because you did not share in my criminal intent. You may be accessories after the fact if you help me cover it up, but we are just talking about the murder charge.
Would you feel the same way if we were at the movies and I killed the clerk who never gives you enough butter for your popcorn? You were present, so are you guilty of murder? Does the fact that the drug transaction is illegal make a difference to you (or Mass.)?
I am not saying that, for example, you three wouldn’t be charged, or that the State would believe that you were with me only to buy drugs. But simple presence, without more, is not enough.
In English common law they would all be equally culpable under the ‘joint enterprise’ doctrine, regardless of whether it was impossible to prove who struck the fatal blow.
This happened over 20 years ago, so the details are a bit fuzzy, and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not saying I understood all the fine points of the law. However, the elements I am quite sure of are that :
a. The group was engaged in, or intended to be engaged in, unlawful activity. I’m pretty sure drugs were involved, but I’m not certain whether it was a simple buy or something more complex.
b. There was no intent on the part of group members (except for the shooter) to murder anyone.
c. The guy who actually pulled the trigger did intend to murder the victim.
d. Under those circumstances, everyone in the group would have been considered guilty of murder, according to the judge’s instructions to the jury.
As I mentioned, the pertinent question in the trial had nothing to do with intent; it was simply whether our defendant was physically present with the group on the occasion of the murder. If he had been, he would have been guilty. But the prosecution failed to make the case that he was there. The defense argued convincingly that the evidence showed that he was somewhere else at the time.
I do think that the fact that the whole group was involved in illegal behavior was pertinent to the issue, so I don’t think the same rule would hold with your example of shooting the popcorn butter miser.
If you replace buying pot with something that’s a felony (say you were going to collect drug money), that’s how I understand felony murder laws work. You shared criminal intent to commit the felony, and a death occurred while you were felonizing, and that’s all you need for the murder conviction. I don’t know about this specific case or the specific law for it, but I don’t find it hard to believe that a state has a law that works like that - the idea is that if you are committing a crime and someone dies, everyone committing the crime is responsible, even the getaway driver at a bank robbery.
There’s not a crime going on there, so it’s a different situation. If your group was robbing the theater and you killed the clerk, you would definitely hit felony murder territory.
I think the concept of felony murder is rather unjust. That being said, no politician is going to win a lot of votes by campaigning on a platform of “Overturn felony murder; it’s unfair.”
