I am in qualified agreement.
Well, if people tend to do the same thing that they’ve done before, he’d probably offer to drive the car for another robbery. And he’s shown that he has bad judgement when picking people to do crimes with. Now, as he gets older he might decide it’s a bad idea to aid and abet, but I doubt that his judgement is going to improve.
I might say he shouldn’t receive a death penalty for driving the car, and I might be okay with him being more likely to get parole sooner, if there’s evidence that he’s gotten older and wiser. But a matching sentence at the beginning? I’ll go with that.
No. An eye for an eye would call for execution as the punishment for murder.
I am aware of the basics of penal theory.
Googling, it seems that the driver was not charged.
IANAL, but this does not seem to be the distinction according to the Wikipedia articles.
You are correct that the principle of Felony Murder is that there need be no explicit intent to kill, provided that death was a reasonably forseeable outcome of the crime that was committed; and that the principle has been controversially extended to encompass peripheral associated deaths, such as a pursuing police officer crashing his car and dying.
But Felony Murder thus also encompasses the principle that has been (sometimes controversially) to convict people peripherally connected to the commission of the crime, such as getaway drivers - or the more controversial example quoted above. I’m not sure whether the principle of Common Purpose would be sufficient in some of these cases?
There was a recent case in Oklahoma where a resident killed three intruders in self defense. Somewhat counterintuitively, the getaway driver (Elizabeth Marie Rodrigue) has been charged with Felony Murder even though the only people who died where her co-conspirators.
No, you misunderstand a point here.
The felony murder rule makes the shooter guilty of murder.
The joint enterprise rule makes the driver equally guilty.
To understand the distinction, consider these two situations.
First of all, consider a case where it is a hit, not a robbery. Driver and gunman went there with the direct intention of killing somebody. The felony murder rule does not apply, it’s murder full stop. The driver is equally guilty as the shooter, under the joint enterprise rule.
Secondly, consider an armed robbery where nobody gets shot. The crime is armed robbery, no murder took place. The felony murder rule does not apply. The driver is equally guilty of the crime of armed robbery under the joint enterprise rule.
See the difference?
Now, in the case described by Skald, both rules apply. It is felony murder AND joint enterprise. But his question appears to be more about the latter.
Let’s change the hypothetical slightly:
Isaac’s buddy(s) invite him out for a “night on the town,” knowing Isaac’s the only one of them with a car.
While heading to the club, one of Isaac’s friends says, “Hey, pull into this store up ahead; I need smokes and shit. Go ahead and fill up, bro, I’ll take care of it inside for ya.”
Isaac does so, and starts filling up his car (mildly pleased that at least one of his bros kicked in for some gas), while his buddies go into the store. He then hears gunfire, and sees his buddies running out of the store.
They all pile in and Isaac burns rubber getting out of there, not knowing precisely what the hell is going on, but just wanting to get away from the proximity of gunfire.
Later we find out one or more of his buddies planned the robbery all along, Isaac being duped into being the unknowing, unwitting getaway driver by his duplicitous “friends.”
What’s Isaac’s criminal culpability here?
This is actually not all that hypothetical.
No, I understand the distinction you’re drawing here. I’m just not convinced that it’s quite accurate to say that these are separate principles. It appears to me that Felony Murder has be used not only to bring a murder charge where there was no explicit intent to kill; but also to charge people more peripherally involved in the crime than the principle of joint enterprise would allow. Although not, perhaps, in the case described by Skald.
None at all. But he might have a hard job proving it.
There is no hypothetical to change. Except that I changed Isaac’s name, the situation in the OP is real.
Yup, right on.
If you race past my house in your getaway car, and it spooks my cat into hiding in my sock drawer, they you sure as heck are gonna be held accountable for the child support resulting from that punctured condom.
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Just how many levels of indirection are allowed, in spreading the guilt, hmmm?
I think it’s just. So basically he was only there to help them get away with it.
Did Isaac immediately drive them to a police station?
My apologies; I did read the OP, and many of the comments, such that by the time I posted it had slipped from my mind that we weren’t entertaining a Skaldian Dilemma.
No; scared out of his wits, he played along, drove them to the club, dropped them off near the door, said he was going to go find a parking spot, dialed 911 and essentially turned himself in. It was a bit touch-and-go legally for him, but the DA was a human being, “Jacob” cooperated, had a clean record, a good lawyer, and video clearly showed he never left the gas pumps to enter the store.
His “friends” still tried to implicate him though, said he was in on it all along, but it didn’t wash, as the “friends” gave multiple contradictory accounts and statements to the point that if they said that grass was green and the sky was blue, the police would be consulting an official Sherwin-Williams color chart to verify their claim.
Still, “Jacob” (the son of a friend; when he was younger, I was content to call him a nephew, but we’d grown apart by the time this crap came down, and I got a lot of info second- or even third-hand) had a serious wake-up call on the importance of choosing friends, even acquaintances, with care, as well as how easy it can be to get entangled with the law.
But under the rule of law, and given the story and events as it was related to me, I’m supposing that he might have been charged with accessory to armed robbery, accessory to aggravated assault/attempted murder, criminal facilitation, etc.
That’s not the same. The hitman has specific intent to get someone murdered. Isaac did not. Now, if Isaac had been driving his buddies to a murder job, then he should get a stiffer penalty, but still not the same as the outright trigger-puller.
And disregard it in the case of murder because…?
Well, I feel I need to voice my minority opinion and back SamuelA up: this, despite everyone’s protests to the contrary.
Wanting to ruin somebody’s life forevermore just because they committed a crime when young and dumb, and somebody who was also involved and even dumber killed somebody, isn’t justice. That’s pretty much the maximum-culpability theoretical extreme, and I don’t think even THAT’S justice. When you take into account the fact that in practice, this is mostly used to give prosecutors more “tough on crime” murder convictions, to let them tack murder charges onto any situation where a cop gets trigger happy, and to railroad poor people into life sentences in our already world-toppingly over-sentenced and overcrowded prison system, it’s a farce.
Everyone here sounds like fussy old bourgeois white people whose only contacts with the criminal justice system have been calling the police to report suspicious people in their suburban mcmansion neighborhood.
I know that’s not true for Skald or everyone here (although it’s certainly true in the aggregate for the Dope if you read the “what’s your marketing segment” thread), but that’s the spirit of the responses I’m reading here. “Well he was dumb enough to hang out with shady people in his teens / twenties, so he CHOSE to take part in that murder he didn’t plan, witness, or have any control over. Don’t like the time, don’t do the crime!”
In practice, this has almost universal negatives and zero deterrent effect. All it serves to do is swell our permanent underclass, soak taxpayers who are now on the hook to pay $32k a year per prisoner for every year for the rest of their lives, and enrich some private prison owners.
No-one here is saying the criminal justice system is uniformly more just than criminal. Some people just think the rule is reasonable or practical.
I really, really wish young people did not do stupid things and ruin their entire lives, but sometimes they do.
Did Isaac know that Julie and Gopher were planning to rob the clerk? Did Doc have a gun on him? If the answers were yes and no, respectively, Isaac was just as much of the “Princess Gang” as the big boss Stubing.
As I recall, Charles Manson didn’t stab anyone. He didn’t even go out on the murder runs. And yet he was held just as culpable as the actual perps.
StG
The OP describes a case where a get away driver had knowledge that the robbers were armed, intended to use their weapons to conduct the robbery, and should have known that a murder was a possible result of the crime, and yet voluntarily participated. That is probably a common type of case where felony murder is applied and I think many responses have been addressing that situation. A thread describing a case where a get away driver did not know that his associates were armed, or unaware that armed robbery was planned, perhaps unaware that any serious crime was intended might elicit different responses.
I don’t disregard it. But it’s a subject I happen to know a great deal about. So when I find myself in disagreement with somebody on this subject, I generally conclude that my opinion is better.