Announcement

**Jayster** · 03-06-2009, 07:03 AM

IIRC, didn't his employers and wife describe him as a completely stable, normal individual. It's amazing how someone can "snap" so fast(convenient for defenses), however I'm sure the sanitarium is pretty jacked up in his own right.

**Spivonious** · 03-06-2009, 08:02 AM

Originally posted by MikeStrat View Post

I'm with you 100%. My wife is an attorney and we talk about this kind of shit all the time. It's amazing what people get away with on a legal loophole.

Last summer a girl who had been drinking crossed the center line on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in MD. She caused the driver of an 18 wheeler to plunge off the side of the bridge and of course he died.

This also caused the state to spend hundreds of thousands in repair and structural evaluations.

Her punishment: A $35 moving violation citation.

Real Estate – Capital Gazette

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/for/2009/02/18-58/Woman-pays-470-in-bridge-fatality.html

Annapolis and Anne Arundel County real estate listings and news from Capital Gazette

Here's the details. Her blood alcohol was .03, well below the legal limit of .08. She was cited for three things and paid the fines. She claims she fell asleep at the wheel, which I believe being that it happened at 4AM.

**Shawn Lutz** · 03-06-2009, 08:04 AM

to kill anyone outside of self defense means you aren't mentally all there. nonetheless we still should be able to eliminate any murderer from the gene pool

**Vass** · 03-06-2009, 08:04 AM

While I am hardly one that normally would be considered soft on crime, it's notable here that, in an extremely publicized case, even the Prosecutor agreed that the criminal justice system doesn't best serve- I don't see it in this article, but one I read yesterday said they called 2 expert witnesses- One for the defense, one for the prosecution. The defense expert said, "He's nuts". The prosecution expert was called for rebuttal and said, "He sure is".

Assuming this isn't a pattern (by the prosecutor- just turning people loose, etc), I respect the prosecutor for doing what he believes is the right thing. He's going into it knowing he's going to get a metric shitload of grief for it, but is going to do it anyway because he believes it's the right thing. That takes some integrity, even if we were to review the facts & disagree with him.

Tim- Regarding pre-meditated & spontanious: Mens rea, "guilty mind", is the common law standard for liability for crimes. Basically, you aren't guilty of an act unless your head was guilty. There's different degrees of this- A few situations:

-A guy driving down the road, a woman walks out from between two cars, gets hit, killed.

-Same guy, on his cellphone, playing with the radio- Woman walks out, gets hit, dead.

-Same guy, doing 100mph in a 25, woman....gets hit, dead.

-Same guy, leaving a party, girl slaps him, he jumps into the car, she follows him into the street, yelling, he guns the car at her intentionally in the heat of the moment, she again gets squashed.

-Same guy, sitting in the darkness in a stolen car, with a disguise & a life insurance policy, waiting outside his ex-wife's house, night after night, waiting for an opportunity to run her over, which he finally gets.

And to draw more towards this case- Same guy, 50 years from now, senile, walked out of his group home, thinks that the woman in the street is coming to get him to take him back, freaks out and runs her over.

The net result of all of these scenarios are the same-dead victim- but the criminal culpability & the way that the law, and a judge, will approach them, are very different. In the example, we'd go all the way from "no culpability" all the way to 1st degree pre-meditated murder.

The reason 1st degree is so much worse is precisely because you HAVE had time to think about it. We've all probably been mad enough to bash someone's head in, even if we didn't mean to kill them- That's unacceptable, but what's more unacceptable is leaving the angry situation, stewing over it for 3 days, buying a gun, and going to the object of your anger's house and blowing him away after you've had plenty and time and distance to cool off.

I used to wonder why people would basically be penalized for being organized, but the organized part is what gets you an extra couple years on your sentence

Vass

**horns666** · 03-06-2009, 09:10 AM

Vass, good scenarios. Unfortunately, most of the the F-1/F-2s would plea bargain to a much lesser crime. Some of the upper examples you provided would get probation if that.

It's how well the suspects and their lawyers articulate and play their hand. Dahmer was "crazy" but competent to stand trial. He didn't convey or convince anyone that he was crazy enough..but it worked out better for him.

**Endrik** · 03-06-2009, 09:45 AM

the law will never work perfectly... nowhere in the world

and there always will be horrible criminals... no matter where you live... it's just some people's nature

if you live in a good environment, then you are lucky that there's not much social causes which would multiple the crime rate, you only have the scum who would kill anyway no matter what
something went awfully wrong during the evolution, our brains are too complex and vulnerable, we are all fucking nuts, but I'm clad that I'm not that crazy to chop some one's head off.

**horns666** · 03-06-2009, 10:24 AM

We should having a branding system..right on the forehead. We do it for license plates of drunks and pedos..fuggit..do it for people.

**Vass** · 03-06-2009, 10:43 AM

Originally posted by horns666 View Post

Vass, good scenarios. Unfortunately, most of the the F-1/F-2s would plea bargain to a much lesser crime. Some of the upper examples you provided would get probation if that.

It's how well the suspects and their lawyers articulate and play their hand. Dahmer was "crazy" but competent to stand trial. He didn't convey or convince anyone that he was crazy enough..but it worked out better for him.

Bill- Yep, you're 100% right. In Hudson County (where Jersey City sits) the plea is the order of the day. Every time they whack some dude on a murder or agg assault, the paper says the same thing: "Mr. GoodSon was in prison from 2002-2003 for posession of a weapon for unlawful purposes, from 2003.5 to 2005 for robbery & assault, from 2005.5 to 2007 on attempted rape & sexual battery, and got out in April of 2008. Upon his release he bashed some poor slob over the head and stole his iPod."

I don't know and would like to know if it's our prosecutor who is just skipping these through to keep his rates high or if there's a few judges sitting on these cases who split to the minimum more times than not. It's a shame, because (as you know better than most) of the criminal population there's a subset that is responsible for an absolutely amazing amount of mayhem....if you keep them locked up, you cut crime far out of proportion to what you'd think given their representation in the population.

This particular case steps out from that in a number of ways- First in that it doesn't appear that the defendant has a criminal record, and second in that while this was "pled out" in a sense, it was more of a diversion than anything else.

As uncommon as it is in the real world (although it's endemic on TV and in some toolbox defense lawyer's minds) there are of course legit insanity defenses- Seems like this was one of them.

For Dahmer, specifically...the law recognizes the difference between "that's fuckin' crazy" and "that dude's crazy". Obviously kidnapping young men, drilling holes in their head and filling them with industrial cleaner in the hopes of making zombie sex slaves is "fucking crazy". Same with sawing off a guy's head and trying to eat him. But Dahmer knew what he was doing was wrong- Or at least that's what the court found. He just wanted zombies, and he went for it. This guy (the court believes) honestly believed that the guy he killed was going to try to hurt him.

There was a story about 15 years ago in Jersey where a guy totally snapped and thought his mom or wife, can't remember which, was (I know it's hard not to laugh) a giant alien fucking lobster, who was chasing him around the house- He killed the woman, and afterwords, when he get medicated was utterly devastated, destroyed- He had no reason/motive to do what he did, there was no gain, he didn't try to hide, nothing- He apparently legitimately was terrified by his delusions and took a life.

We can all sit here and go, that's fuckin' ridiculous, no way....but imagine, as you're reading this, a giant fucking alien lobster walked up and put its claw on your shoulder...You would go absolutely ape shit wild. Imagine after destroying the lobster you got arrested, and 2 days later they showed you your best friend in a box. Should you go to prison?

Real, serious, deep mental illness (not "my mommy didn't love me" mental illness) is super rare, but it does happen.

Vass

**442w30** · 03-06-2009, 11:13 AM