Hopefully this is an ok thread to post this.
For me, the most frightening documentation yet of Jan. 6 is this interview from this morning with Judy Woodruff and Washington State’s Patty Murray, the highest-ranking female Democrat in the Senate, speaking for the first time about how perilously close things got for her and her husband on Jan. 6.
What she had to say got my circulation going more than any video from that day certainly did, and not in a good way.
Wish this i-view had happened at the beginning of this second round of impeachments. I knew it wouldn’t have swayed Republicans’ minds, but it would have brought more exposure and gravity to the proceedings, and more for the Republicans to own, for what I like to call their “pillock optics”.
I think people are so polarized and people’s attention is divided between so many things that it probably wouldn’t have changed opinions much.
Something that I pointed out in the “Do we impeach or not” debate back in 2019 was the fact that we live in an entirely different age now. I remember people recalling how they came home from school and the impeachment trials were on – and that was the only thing that was on TV, on all 3 or 4 channels that people had at the time. People have 500 channels to flip through now, not to mention their social media and their internet browsing activities. It’s not the same world. We live in our own little electronic neighborhoods, which probably has a lot to do with how we got into this mess to begin with.
So far, The Doobie Smoker, The Bullhorn Lady and The Podium Stealer (among others) have been charged. I’m waiting for the arrests of the cop killers/mutilators. I have yet to see a picture of anyone wanted in connection with these crimes saying “Anybody know who this is?” Surely, there exists video and or pictures of these crimes in progress. I can only hope that the delay in charging those responsible is to build a tighter case and not lack of evidence or suspects. In my experience, a delay in arrests does not bode well.
One problem seems to be that Brian Sicknick’s cause of death is unclear. At first it was supposed to be due to being hit with a fire extinguisher, now it is thought to be due to ingesting bear spray.
And that starts to come back to the reason for felony murder statutes in the first place.
If a felony is committed, someone dies, but none of those committing the felony can be directly linked as the reason that the person died, then no one can be charged.
In my mind, everyone who crossed the barricades was complicit in the deaths of not just the officer, but also of the insurrectionists who died in the attempt to overthrow our government.
And we spend more time talking about the deaths, but there were also a number of other people who were injured and maimed, who will never return to their previous quality of life. People need to be held accountable for that as well.
Harder to quantify (in terms of how to redress such harms), but not harder to assign blame, are the two LEO suicides and the countless new cases of PTSD:
Huh. IANAL but I always read the statutes as basically: if a person dies during the commission of a felony for whatever reason (e.g. a guy sees a gun in a bankrobber’s hand and keels over from a coronary) it’s considered murder. If this got changed, I hadn’t heard about it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I think @k9bfriender meant that before the felony murder statues were enacted nobody could be charged when the details of causation were unclear.
So to correct that apparent injustice, the felony murder statutes were enacted. So that somebody, anybody could be punished if somebody, anybody died during a serious crime. Which, as you say, is where we are today.
Which results in a different set of injustices, but that’s a debate for another thread.
So, I would assume assaulting a member of the Capitol police would be a felony. Would spraying said officer with bear spray at close range meet the “death is foreseeable” condition?
We’ll sure. That would be murder, or manslaughter. But we were talking about felony murder.
So you need to show: that the other people (not the attacker) were in on the crime, knew that there was a possibility of one of their members attacking someone with bear spray and went along with the crime anyway. The thing that’s getting in the way is that the crowd was not one entity. They were all there for their own reasons. You’d have to find the people inolved with the person who killed the cop in order to link them to the murder. Joe schmoe who went there to “stop the steal” and had never met Steve Bearspray and had no idea what he planned is not liable to felony murder.
Common misconception about Bear Spray. It’s not more lethal or dangerous than Pepper Spray, in fact it is less so. Humans are less sensitive to the irritating agents, and so require a bigger hit. Bears also move faster and less predictably, so Bear Spray is designed to hit a much larger area in a sort of “blanket attack” instead of the pinpoint eye/nose tactic used with civilian Pepper Spray.
So, arguing that using bear spray could forseeably cause death is fairly weak. It’s not more dangerous than pepper spray, and deaths from pepper spray are exceedingly rare so far as I’m aware… but, it’s also illegal in and of itself. Bear Spray isn’t cleared for use on humans, so you fall into all kinds of bad jujubees for using it on people. Especially officers.
I just don’t think it gets you to Felony Murder on its own.
Not disagreeing with your overall point. But ref the above, how does accomplice awareness of the bad guys’ plans evolve over time?
IOW, Joe Schmoe goes to the rally intending to be one of the massive crowd protesting “the steal” he’s heard so much about on TwitFace. He happens to stand next to some of the hard core insurrection commandos w armor vests, flex-cuffs, and all the rest. He overhears them trash-talking about their plan to capture and hang Pence & Pelosi.
As luck would have it, as the crowd surges towards the Capitol doors Joe is right near these guys. One of whom kills a policeman on video while Joe is a few feet back but clearly visible on the vid as part of the throng forcing the doors open and the police into retreat through sheer weight of bodies.
Now what? Joe was definitely not a co-conspirator 2 days ago. But he’s a trespasser and some level of accessory at the moment of the murder. Joe surely understood by the time the throng was thronging up the Capitol steps that people, including police people, could be trampled or beaten just based on the numbers and common sense knowledge of mob dynamics.
How much awareness and involvement is enough when? Heck if I know.
Here is a NYT article that covers alot of the same points I made.
Federal law lists 11 crimes that can serve as a basis for felony murder: arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery.
Legal experts say the one most likely to apply in the Capitol riot is burglary, defined as entering a building with the intent to commit an additional crime. Simply having entered the Capitol unlawfully would not be enough, and intent is difficult to prove.
Beyond that, there are other significant hurdles, said Guyora Binder, an expert on felony murder at the University at Buffalo School of Law. One is the question of who qualifies as an accomplice.
"Let’s say you enter with the intent to commit one crime, and half an hour later I enter with the intent to commit another crime and we never see each other, and I’ve never heard of you,” he said. “So we’re both committing burglaries, but we’re not committing the same burglary. I’m not your accomplice. You’re not my accomplice.”
Another wrinkle: Whether the death must be foreseeable or in furtherance of the underlying felony is “an open question” in federal law, Mr. Binder said, because courts have ruled different ways.
Still another question is raised by the deaths of Ms. Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland, who appears to have been trampled to death as fellow rioters fought their way into the building. A fourth person died after a stroke, and a fifth after a heart attack.
It is unclear whether the federal law allows for felony murder charges in a “third-party” death, such as one caused by a victim or, in Ms. Babbitt’s case, a law enforcement officer. Such cases are not unheard-of in state courts, though they are often among the most controversial uses of the felony murder rule.
In the end, not all who entered the Capitol are going to be treated as equally culpable, Ms. McQuade said. Some may argue that they came in with the sole purpose of expressing their views, while others were clearly reckless and violent.