I was lead to believe that in Florida at least it does not have to be planned beforehand to be murder. For instance if I were to see someone on the street and think to myself for a second “hey, wouldn’t it be great to shoot someone just to watch them die?” and I did, it would not be planned aforehand but it would still be murder.
So even if the cop did shoot him on the spur of the moment then it might be murder. Of course it would be up for the courts to decide if it was simply manslaughter or murder.
In the absence of malice aforethought, and in the absence of a reasonable basis for a complete defense (self-defense, etc.), the charge would be manslaughter. Manslaughter is the charge used when someone kills “in self-defense,” but without a reasonable fear for his (or anyone’s) life or safety. It’s the charge used when the killing is willful, but without malice aforethought (without time to reflect or deliberate, under strong provocation, etc.)
This thread has seen several iterations of this “logic:”
POSTER A: Idi Amin was a cannibal!
POSTER B: Actually, that’s a myth.
POSTER A: So, you’re fine with all of Amin’s murderous rampages, then?
POSTER A: Er… no. Just pointing out that he wasn’t a cannibal.
So too here. How many posters have taken my statement that these actions do not rise to the level of criminality and responded with, “Oh, so you’re fine with them, then?”
The problem, as I’ve pointed out in another thread, is that the only reason this was considered not criminal is because the DA determined it was not criminal. It’s one man’s (admitedly weighty) opinion but it really has no bearing on whether the actions were right or wrong or even legal or illegal. The only question it answers is whether it was criminal or not criminal and we STILL have a right to argue on that very point and say “no, I disagree with the DA.”
As to the question of what the guy could have done to save his life and you responded to the effect of don’t get involved in illegal activities. Sorry but that’s just a ridiculous argument and you know it. That guy could have been anyone. It could have been the guy’s girlfriend (who could have avoided dying by not dating someone who is a roomate to a guy the police want). It could have been the guy’s kid (who could have avoided dying by not being born to a guy who rents a room to another guy who the police want).
You can respond to this with “but that isn’t who they found so all those hypotheticals are irrelevant.”
My response is this: at the point where the police shot a guy for standing in his own home and NOT because he was engaged in any activity from his past to which you could even absurdly try to justify retroactively his shooting, he just becomes a random guy that can be subbed in for random girlfriend or random kid or random Mother Teresa for all it matters.
Asked and answered, more than once in this thread. I listed several things that the police did wrong.
I don’t believe you’ll find too many criminal lawyers who hear these facts and believe that they add up to murder or manslaughter. I’m a former defense attorney, but Hamlet (who has no particular fondness for me) is a former prosecutor, and he agrees with that analysis as well.
So it’s not just the DA. It’s other people who have some basic understanding of criminal law.
You misunderstand me. My answer was not to justify the actions of the police, but simply to answer the implied criticism that “Here was a completely innocent guy, and the police shot him.”
Yes, because of the poor police planning and execution here, the death could have been meted out to someone who really was completely innocent. That would make this a much greater tragedy, but it STILL wouldn’t make it murder.
The issue is that many if not most of us that have watched the video, do not believe that the SWAT member was in, or could have thought that he was in any way in immediate danger.
The SWAT member acted completely inappropriately to the situation at hand, had prior knowledge of the situation that he was putting himself in, had a DRAWN loaded weapon and lights, body armor and back up.
As I said before, I expect better from a common Joe that happens to own a handgun. These where trained SWAT officers, with a wild cannon that led them in.
IF the deceased had managed through some miracle to shoot and kill a member of that team, I am quite sure that HE would have been charged with manslaughter or murder while defending his home. Or just being scared and confused.
Works both ways. The police are not immune from this. They need to obey the law just like the rest of us.
You’re just mad because I tore your torturing hypocrite supporting ass a new one in GD.
However it’s not my fault you’re too fucking vain to admit there was no reasonable thing the victim could do to survive the attack. Unless there was, do you have an answer for what the victim could reasonably have done survive the attack?
The victim had no reasonable control. Doors open, BAM dead. Now you seem to argue they felt his golf club was a threat. Maybe they had a traumatizing run-in with a sand trap, maybe they thought he was the Titleist Samurai. Who knows, but the police chose that manor to barge in. They put the man in a position of self defense from possible assailants. They bear the responsability of how their choices unfold.
When one of them kills an innocent person for the crime of reacting as any reasonable person would, than that death is more than just an accident. It’s negligence bordering on maliciousness.
However I see the argument for possible negligence, and since I was raised better than to be a vain jackass, unlike you. I do see I was wrong in classifying it as definite murder. It may be murder or it may be manslaughter.
It was however unnecessary and the gunman cop has blood on his hands.
As has already been pointed out, for all the officers knew (since I see no indication that they tried to identify him, and you even admit that such identification is irrelevant) he was just some guy at the house who may or may not have anything to do with alleged illegal activity therein.
Further, even if a presumption of innocence is insufficient, being completely innocent is no defense either, as has been that case in other incidents where police raided the wrong house entirely.
The standards for no-knock warrants seem to be quite low in the U.S., and since each raid carries the possibility of someone getting killed, it seems obvious enough to me that lower standards lead to more raids which lead to more deaths, and I’m unconvinced that this is necessary for the eternal American war on drugs nor that it’s okay, as you imply, if the people being gunned down are drug dealers. Heck, why not loosen SWAT standards even more - appoint rubber-stamp judges who will sign off on any warrant presented to them (to keep it nice and legal), ramp up police excitement levels by requiring them to chug coffee beforehand to the point where they’ll twitch-shoot at just about anything, dispense with necessary verbal warnings (or reduce the standard so if an officer was thinking about verbally identifying himself as an officer, it counts), and, heck, you could fill every morgue in the country with suspected drug dealers. Or just drop the “suspected”, if you like, since being in a house where police say drug dealing occured makes you a drug dealer, apparently.
I came back here to respond to Bricker, but I see its been done…
All I am taking away from your arguments Bricker, is that so long as the warrant was legally obtained, then everythings fine and everyone in the house is fair game - whether they are guilty of anything beyond being in a SUSPECTED drug house or not.
I’m not going to speak for anyone else, but I kinda want to know if the actions of the please where necessary, reasonable and appropriate.
For necessary - from what they knew, was this the only (best) way to get the evidence they were looking for? Was there another, less risky way they could have achieved the same ends ? From the information at hand, the answer to this seems to be a resounding - NO it wasn’t necessary (didn’t they have a plan to arrest him outside the house that they botched, why couldn’t they do that again?)
Reasonable - was it reasonable to send a team of heavily armed men into the house in the dead of the night after this specific guy? What information did they have to hand that he was violent, had a large arsenal or was otherwise a threat? And sorry - having drugs in the house doesn’t automatically make him a threat, it would need to be something more than just that. Like, say, past arrests for violent offenses, known ownership of weapons etc etc.
Appropriate; is it appropriate to send teams of heavily armed men breaking into someone’s house in the dead of night on the suspicion that they have a small amount of drugs there? Given the threat profile he presented I also don’t see that it’s appropriate.
All in all, the Police needlessly created a situation where injury and / or death was more likely than not. A situation that there was no pressing need to create, the guy that pulled the trigger acted like he was in some sort of shoot em up arcade game and should be facing some sort of charges.
Well, in my opinion, the actions of the police were not reasonable, necessary, or appropriate. I have already detailed, in this very thread, a non-exclusive list of preparations that reasonable SWAT teams make before serving a warrant like this. For the police to forgo those preparations was a mistake on their parts.
But “mistake” does not equal “crime.”
If you mean disciplinary actions, including termination, from the police, I couldn’t agree more.
But if you mean criminal charges, I must disagree.
The question would then be, are these mistakes ordinary or do they suggest criminal recklessness?
I get into a car accident and someone dies, it can be a typical driving error, unforseeable accident, or it can be manslaughter due to my recklessness.
In this case, I agree with you that the shooting officer is not guilty of a crime, because he was technically defending himself from a possible attack. However, I’d leave open the possibility that one or more officers should be criminally liable for creating the hazardous situation that lead to a person’s death.
No. As I detailed in an earlier post, the best practice prior to a SWAT action is a full briefing beforehand, with officers given the floorplan and going over different approaches. In this case, the SWAT team leaders failed to do that.
So the officer did NOT have the requisite prior knowledge, and was forced to act on his own instinct. However, merely not performing the best practice possible is not the same as gross negligence, or a dramatic deviation from the ordinary standard of care.
No. Simple negligence that causes a death is not manslaughter, at least not in Utah. Utah law recognizes four different mental states for the purposes of criminal liability: intent, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence (see State v. Vigil, 842 P. 2d 843 (Utah Supreme Ct 1992)). Recklessness is defined in Utah’s criminal code, § 76-2-103(3). A person acts recklessly when:
(emphasis added)
As long as the no-knock warrants are generally served in this fashion throughout the country – and they are; that’s one of the complaints in this thread, after all – you will never be able to show, as a matter of law, that this conduct was a “gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the actor’s standpoint.”
That’s a better argument, but it still founders on the “gross deviation” shoals. If police serve no-knock warrants in this fashion with some frequency, how can you possibly show that this particular instance was a gross deviation from the ordinary standard of care?
The police lawfully entered the house pursuant to the execution of a valid warrant.
I’m sure that the man may have thought they broke in… but if we’re trying to figure out if the police committed a crime, what the resident thought is not remotely relevant.
