man that killed drunk driver not guilty

[Borgholio]

However, it is possible under US law that drunk driving is considered a serious crime that makes any deaths that happen during it murder. If so, I withdraw my objection.

It would likely be vehicular manslaughter, where your negligence or recklessness resulted in the death of another person. It would only be murder if the driver deliberately used his car to specifically kill those two kids. Getting drunk and driving is negligent and reckless but it is not intending to kill or assault anyone.

[Alyrium Denryle]

However, it is possible under US law that drunk driving is considered a serious crime that makes any deaths that happen during it murder. If so, I withdraw my objection.

It would likely be vehicular manslaughter, where your negligence or recklessness resulted in the death of another person. It would only be murder if the driver deliberately used his car to specifically kill those two kids. Getting drunk and driving is negligent and reckless but it is not intending to kill or assault anyone.

It depends. It CAN be 2nd degree murder if there is a long-standing pattern of conduct with respect to drunk driving. Depraved Indifference to Human Life.

[FTeik]

A lot of lucky "co-incidences" for the accused:
1) the murder-weapon could fit the ammution found in his house OR another weapon,
2) the security-system wasn't working at exactly that night, so no recording of events
and most important: the shooting-victim seemed to have been a piece of scum anyway(gang member, driving drunk), so no great loss.

I wonder, what people would say, if the shooting-victim had been an upstading citicen, not being drunk and crashed into those kids, because they and the car they were pushing were around a bent in the street when it came to the accident.

[His Divine Shadow]

Snip

I'm trying to clarify the difference. Read my previous posts. Were him to get a tire iron and bludgeon the guy to death or just shoot him with the firearm he had on his pocket no one could blame him - human nature.

However look at what we supposedly got - and the reason I care - IF this guy did it, he went home, got gloves, came back, killed the guy and then got rid of the murder weapon. This is not standard human response. This person did not have their mental capabilities impaired by his anger.

You can be cold and calculating and in such a rage that you are not acting as you would normally and this state can last for hours, if not days, it can come back when you think of the event in question, fresh and new even years after the fact.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that you have to be incoherent and raving to be out of your mind.

[Lonestar]

You can be cold and calculating and in such a rage that you are not acting as you would normally and this state can last for hours, if not days, it can come back when you think of the event in question, fresh and new even years after the fact.

In fact, some US States waiting periods for guns(including the one that was mostly-overturned in California recently) are multi-day allegedly for a "cooling down" period. So at least some government legislation is out there with the assumption that you can be unreasonably angry enough to kill for several days.

[Spekio]

You can be cold and calculating and in such a rage that you are not acting as you would normally and this state can last for hours, if not days, it can come back when you think of the event in question, fresh and new even years after the fact.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that you have to be incoherent and raving to be out of your mind.

No I am not. My thought exercise was more along the lines of: It was more along the thoughts of if his diminished capacity, why the forethought to cover up.

In fact, I pointed out it should factor in an eventual sentence.

[His Divine Shadow]

My whole point was that capacity need not be diminished.

[Spekio]

My whole point was that capacity need not be diminished.

If he was angry, yet had full cognition of his actions, you don't think he committed a crime?

[His Divine Shadow]

I don't really know, it depends on his mental state and what it actually was. But what I am trying to say is that I can see how you can be so angry that you literally can only walk down this one path and only physical restraint would stop you, yet be perfectly rational and capable of forethought whilst doing so. If given enough time this extreme emotional state would probably fade and you would not do it, but frankly as a parent and the idea of someone killing my kids, it's not hard to imagine entering such a state.

[Spekio]

I'll repeat what I said to coffee: I'm not arguing that he was not angry. I'm not arguing that his anger directed his actions, and I'm not even arguing that killing the man was something I would not do if faced with the same situation.

Now: Does he fall in the very specific state of (going to use U.S. Law terms Google helped me with) temporary insanity denominated "Heath of Passion"?

This is all hypothetical of course.

[Simon_Jester]

I would argue that a prolonged state of homicidal anger does not count as heat of passion. The reason we talk about 'premeditation' is that this period of thinking about it before hand is supposed to give you time to go "wait, shit, this wrong and illegal even if I really want to do it."

A person might think "no, I really want this person dead therefore I will kill them," and not even seriously consider alternative courses of action. But that's not a 'heat of passion' decision, that's a decision you just refuse to reconsider. The law really can't afford to make exceptions for refusal to reconsider, because there are a LOT of people who feel entitled to commit crimes, or who feel that they 'have no choice.'

I would prefer people not refer to the two children being killed as 'murder', since murder requires intent to kill.

Murder is when you mean to kill someone. When you make a horribly stupid decision and people die that you didn't actually want dead, we have a name for that. We call it "homicidal negligence." There's a difference.

That is not strictly true: depraved-heart murder. Somebody who displays a "callous disregard for human life" can be found guilty of murder even if they did not intend for somebody to die.

Strictly true, but the level of indifference to human life has to move from merely 'reckless' to 'depraved,' so to speak.

In other words, playing Russian roulette can lead to a depraved-heart murder charge. The probability of death in such a 'game' is so overwhelming and huge that even a reckless person should know that it's likely to result in death. So much so that to engage in this conduct, you would have to have a voice inside your head that goes "yeah, the guy might die, lol whatever."

As in, a 'depraved' inner voice.

It's like pushing someone off a three-story building- they might survive but anyone who even pretends they "weren't trying to kill him" should have known it was likely to. So you can't use "I didn't intend for anyone to die" as a defense to "you killed this person by pushing them out of a third-story window."

The reality remains that the vast majority of drunk-driving incidences (an individual who is drunk driving a car) do not result in a death. They don't even result in accidents.

That's why people do it; if literally every time a person got drunk and drove they had an accident, even the drunks wouldn't do it. At least, they wouldn't do it any more often than they deliberately jump off of three-story buildings.

Drunk drivers only hit and kill someone a small percentage of the time. Any given person who decides to drive drunk is (by all available evidence) NOT doing so with specific intent to cause harm. And they are doing something that, while massively dangerous and irresponsible, does in fact result in no physical harm most of the time.

The law can call their conduct 'reckless' or 'negligent.' It can justly punish them for recklessness and negligence and endangering lives. But their conduct is not 'depraved' in the sense of depraved-heart murder.

[NO, this is NOT me saying drunk driving is okay, any more than assault and battery are okay. The point is, there are in fact worse crimes than the decision to get in a car and drive drunk. It is not literally the worst or cruelest or most dangerous thing one human can do to another human. So there are classes of punishment it'd be appropriate to apply to some more serious crime but NOT to the drunk driver.]

It depends. It CAN be 2nd degree murder if there is a long-standing pattern of conduct with respect to drunk driving. Depraved Indifference to Human Life.

This is fair. One could drive drunk persistently enough that the odds of them hitting and killing someone creep up into "depraved" territory. But in itself, any given case of drunk driving cannot be placed in that category without evidence of a track record.

In fact, some US States waiting periods for guns(including the one that was mostly-overturned in California recently) are multi-day allegedly for a "cooling down" period. So at least some government legislation is out there with the assumption that you can be unreasonably angry enough to kill for several days.

I think that's a really good point. Also that cooling-downs are a good idea because they don't impair access or ownership, but make it seriously inconvenient to procure a weapon on short notice (i.e. before you've had time to do any safety training, or because you expect to want someone dead very soon).

[Frank the Tank]

Based on the articles I read, there was limited physical evidence that Barajas was the shooter. For example, although he owned a pistol, it was apparently a different pistol than what Jose Banda was shot with. There was not GSR on Barajas after he was arrested. And so on... so what's with the three pages of speculation about Barajas's potential motivations and opportunities?