But we emphatically do not. People responsible for unlawfully killing someone by different means (but the same result for them) receive dramatically different treatments. One can even see different treatment for physically identical acts, with identical results, based on suppositions that one malefactor was thinking differently than the other, at the time.
I remember seeing an article I found persuasive, which said you can handwave the conceptual hurdle away by effectively saying, when you attempt murder, you’re rolling the dice on whether you kill someone – so the fair thing, every time, is for us to then roll the dice on whether you get a minor punishment or a harsh one, with the same odds as the method you used to attempt murder – so regardless of whether your bullet even hit the guy, we’ll spend a lot of time calculating your marksmanship and how likely the victim would’ve been to survive a gunshot wound from that weapon and so on until we get a probability, and then we’ll roll literal dice to see whether…no, wait; this is stupid; we already have a perfect simulation of your odds: it’s What Actually Happened when you rolled dice metaphorically! Why don’t we just use that?
So, yeah: drive drunk and you deserve a large chance of a small punishment, and a small chance of a big punishment – and that’s exactly what you get – but instead of struggling to deduce the precise odds of you hitting and killing someone with your car, we just figure you’ve already built an eerily accurate model for us! So obliging! Who does that?
I would call “intent” a piece of the puzzle with what actually happened.
Assuming the killing is not intentional, it’s the same crime. And for the same crime the sentence can be different based on the circumstances. It’s a matter of negligence. We certainly can’t punish people based on the worst possible outcome of their negligence, but we have increased penalties as the foreseeable results of that negligence occur.
I think differential punishment for results is only rational to the extent it is a proxy for different levels of recklessness. Taking the celebratory gunfire example, there are a thousand ways in which two people firing a gun into the air might be more or less reckless, and using the fact of the bullet actually hitting someone is not a terrible rule of thumb for determining especially reckless celebratory fire.
But if we are to imagine a scenario in which two people are equally reckless and one of them is just “unlucky” in killing someone, I see no rational basis for punishing the unlucky one more harshly.
Of course, much of our punishment system is built on emotion, not reason. Indeed, to the extent retribution is a goal of punishment, there’s not a whole lot of reasoning to be done. Retribution cannot be measured, and we have only the most anemic philosophy concerning just retribution.
Why is that? The sentencing range for vehicular manslaughter is generally going to be the same one for non-vehicular manslaughter.
I do happen to agree that we make arbitrary distinctions between degrees of homicide that don’t really make sense. It doesn’t matter to me if you killed your wife in the heat of the moment because you caught her in bed with another man, or if you plotted your vengeance for a week and buried her under a concrete deck in the backyard. You’re a deliberate killer.
Now, if you accidentally ran her over while backing out of the garage, that’s not quite so bad.
Only if there is intent. That woman who deliberately plowed into the crowd on the Vegas Strip deserves more punishment than a 90 year old who loses control of her car and kills someone.
As others have touched on, but I’ll state more explicitly, I would argue that these are, in fact, two different crimes. That is, both committed a crime of negligent use of a firearm (or however it might be classed) and the latter is guilty of some form of unlawful homicide (or manslaughter or whatever).
My logic to this is that we, as a society, have decided that certain behaviors, regardless of whether or not they result in any actual property damage, loss, injury or death, are dangerous enough that no one ought to do them. There’s obviously going to be some sort of limitations on what classifies as dangerous behavior and what doesn’t, as in, it is often not a BAC of zero, and not all discharges of a firearm, but usually a BAC above a certain value (usually 0.08) or discharging a firearm above a certain angle or with no clear target or whatnot. One person may even actually be able to more safely navigate a vehicle above 0.08 than someone else below it or possibly even sober, but that’s where the line is drawn. Really, this isn’t all that much different than how we forbid people below a certain age or without a license to drive, why people below certain ages can’t buy cigarettes, alcohol, guns, or certain drugs. Hell, I could guarantee you there are probably kids out there under 16 that can’t legally drive a car who are safer drivers than some people I’ve seen drive. So the point is, this is a crime, regardless of the outcome, but I don’t think anyone really disagrees with that.
The reason I outline that so much though is that the results DO matter. Intent is important, and it establishes certain types of crimes, particularly violent ones, but part of justice is the balancing or attempt to make whole or as close as reasonably possible losses as a result of the behaviors of others. The previous crime is one that basically says we’re not allowed to take these chances because society doesn’t agree that they’re worth it, but that doesn’t mean that if we take that chance fail we’re somehow off the hook. Some REAL person either has damaged or destroyed property or is injured or killed.
So, if we were to set it even based on moral luck, how do we punish it? Do we punish based on what the punishment is on an average failure and adjust based upon chances? Well, that seems to over punish people that take the risk and don’t actually hurt anyone and underpunish anyone who does; it counterintuitively rewards people for causing harm to others. If we just set it based upon the risk, now we’re vastly over-punishing people and that goes astray of our general morality in excessive punishment. So it seems the only fair thing to do is set the general law high enough to discourage people from taking foolish risks, but since some will do it anyway, then they still get punished for the actual crime.
In the end, we’re still responsible for the actual real world consequences of our actions.
So, let’s attach some meat to this discussion.
Let’s say there’s a jurisdiction where the punishment for unlawful discharge of a firearm is punishable by five years in prison. Murder is subject to thirty years in prison.
Two men fire their guns into the air. One man kills another person when the bullet returns to earth, the other does not.
If the first man gets 30 years in prison and the second gets 5 years, I’m fine with that for the reasons I discussed.
How much prison time should each man get in your view? Give me a number.
My position is that they should receive the same punishment if they are equally reckless (which, as I acknowledged, might be difficult to ascertain in reality which is part of why using results can be reasonable).
In such a world–which is decidedly not the criminal justice system we live in now–you might need to ratchet up the penalties for reckless behavior if there’s no enhancement for tragic results. But I’m fine with them getting treated the same, whether it’s five years or one year or ten.
I don’t understand your argument for distinguishing the sentences. It might help to point to what particular goal of punishment you think is furthered by treating identical conduct differently based on unintended consequences.
So, you’re fine if the sentence if one, five or ten. How about 30?
I think that’s a wholly different question. But my answer is that I think a 30-year sentence is too severe for any reckless crime, including murder. Even ten is pushing the limits, in my book.
This.
My own position on the question I posed is that the penalties should be the same, in the ideal case that we can ascertain that what the doer did was the same except for the element of luck. I would guess the best penalty would be in between the severities of the punishments we tend to apply based partly on the luck. As a practical matter, understanding that reckless behavior is fairly likely to lead to quite a serious punishment would probably reduce reckless behavior and improve the average outcome of people’s choices.
Especially, I’m curious “what particular goal of punishment you think is furthered by treating identical conduct differently based on unintended consequences”.
One argument can be made that the legal limit for intoxication is irreverent on a personal level, each person is different and just a crude artifact of the law. So it in itself does not prove any moral wrongdoing. But killing someone does call in to question if someone was too intoxicated to drive, however it does not prove that they had a way to know they were so intoxicated.
No, the example of DUI is a poor one. You’ve been a little brainwashed by the campaign against drunk driving. I am not defending drinking and driving but it isn’t pure luck whether a person who drives with a BAC over whatever the current legislation says is too much doesn’t kill someone. Drinking lowers your reaction time and judgement. But ask yourself this: does every single person who drinks 3 beers have poorer judgement and slower reaction time than everyone else on the road?
The celebratory air shooting is the example to use.
You’re begging the question, here. You’re assuming that people who were “unlucky” should be punished more (then deduce from it that they’re “rewarded” by not getting a harsh sentence) when arguing about whether they should be punished more.
Indeed. Person A might, when realizing he’s driving when he shouldn’t be, assure that he never goes over the speed limit, while person B might think: yoo-hoo, I’m going 60 in a 30 mph zone!!
This.
In the early days of implementing drunk driving regulations, in the state of Washington in the early '80s there were two ranges- a “DWI” at .15+ and a somewhat lesser (but still a felony) charge of “DUI” at .10-.15. Like (all?) other states, the two tiers were eventually abandoned and a single .08 threshold was adopted with equal punishment for .08 as for .25 BAC.
I’m not sure why the slippery slope argument here won so completely, why we adamantly refuse to distinguish between levels of impairment of drivers. It makes little sense to me that it’s fully legal to drive at .07, but the state will impose the maximum penalty at .08. (Technically, if you’re under 21, there is another threshold at .02 here, but that’s a different law and I digress)
You misunderstand DUI laws a little. It’s not so much that it is fully legal to drive at 0.7; you can still be impaired below 0.8 and convicted of DUI. It’s that at 0.8 or above you are conclusively presumed to be impaired.
<annoying parrot voice> I’m not sure why we adamantly refuse to distinguish between age and capability to consent with my sexual partners. It makes little sense to me that it’s fully legal for me to fuck a sixteen year-old, but the crown will impose the maximum penalty if she was fifteen and 11 months. </annoying parrot voice>
Or maybe, everyone thinks they are a special snowflake and that they are the exception to the rule. Thus, we create the the legal fiction of a bright line with no exceptions so everyone knows where the line is. Then when they cross the line, we prosecute them for committing a crime. Sure, the bright line is a fiction, but it is a useful one. In this case, it sends a strong message to members of society that this is something that we don’t tolerate, and keeps drunks off the road. A fuzzier law would not be as effective.
If you or Carnal want to argue that this is a bad thing, maybe you can come up a reason that we should be allowing more drunk people to drive. I can’t think of one, but I’m open to the possibility.
As regards to the original OP, a DUI that causes death make look the same as a plain-old DUI to the drunk driver, but what about the family of the dead guy? It’s quite different to them. Do they not deserve justice? If some drunk driver ran over your mother, killing her, do you believe it would be fair and just for that drunk driver to receive the same sentence as if he ran over a stop sign?