Yeah, I think it's obvious it was an accident. She is charged with 1st and 2nd degree manslaughter. I'm not clear on how the law would apply here, but 1st degree doesn't seem to fit.
Accidents happen and they are tragic. This woman going to prison isn't going to improve society. She needs to pay a cost, but time in prison doesn't seem appropriate. Our judicial system is wholly incapable of measuring out justice appropriately in so many cases.
By this reasoning, the person who incorrectly assembles a scaffold, which later collapses and kills a construction worker, should not face a prison sentence. The modern world is filled with situations where simple decisions made by a person who is in a position of responsibility can result in a loss of life.
I'm saying prison time /= justice. She made a terrible mistake, but I'm objecting to prison time being what pays for it.
The definition of first degree murder depends upon a state's specific definition. In my state, Louisiana, a charge of first degree murder is very rare because any element of emotional distress in the defendant can be used by the defense and reduce the charge to second degree. However, the law also allows a sentence of life without parole for some cases of second degree murder.
Isn't this manslaughter, not murder? I'm assuming that distinction matters in this state.
The term "Napoleonic Code" gets mentioned anytime Louisiana law is considered. What this means in bv reality is every degree of the a crime defined and has to meet certain criteria. Most appeals are based on an argument over degree.
In the case at hand, we need to recognize this is not a matter of an ordinarily innocuous object becoming deadly, such as knocking a flower pot off a 3rd floor window and killing a pedestrian.
This officer went into the situation knowing she had a deadly weapon. She used this weapon to kill a person. We cannot call this kind of action an "accident", any more than when a drunk driver strikes and kills a pedestrian. It was a error in judgment in the use of a deadly weapon, which resulted in bv the death of a person.
Why should this officer receive special treatment? Imagine a civilian in the same situation. They kill a person, but claim they only intended to intimidate and pulling the trigger was an accident. Is that a viable defense against a murder charge?
The cop has been forced for long hours under direction of instructors to repeatedly draw their gun when faced with adverse circumstances.
It is highly likely that the training to do so for a taser is lacking, and "training to draw exactly a _____ when drawing for a _____" is also probably lacking.
That is the defense against criminality.
It still shouldn't be defense of a job in law enforcement, and absolutely indicates a need for immediate mandatory re-training of the rest of the force. Or, see my last post.
You are asserting facts which I don't know to be in evidence. Whatever training this police department proscribed, this officer is the only one to kill someone because she mistook a pistol for a tazer. When a person runs over a pedestrian(it's been a bad day for pedestrians), we don't blame their driving instructor in an attempt to reduce the offense.
There maybe deficiencies in an organization, but every individual is responsible for their own decisions and actions.
It's not "mistaken for". It's literally "reflexively retrieved." The failure here seems to be one of understanding how exactly we call our bodies to action. I could WANT to grab the tazer, do what I thought was grabbing it, and still be unable to in duress because of training and instead find a gun there.
It is not the kind of thing that comes down to culpability directly.
I absolutely WOULD blame a driving instructor and driving instruction course if it taught "drivers have the right of way at all times over pedestrians because pedestrians shouldn't be stupid about how dangerous cars are and it's their own damn fault", and then forced students to drill on that.
Criminal culpability requires a choice made by the agent held culpable. When there is only one dominant training which has created supremacy of a behavioral pattern as a response over the desired behavior, that is not going to be a true choice that can be made except in situations of extremely low duress.
If she didn't mistake her pistol for her taser, then it was an intentional act. If a police officer is to be excused of responsibility for shooting someone who should have been tased, we have just granted a license to kill.
This sounds more like a death which resulted not because of training, but the failure to benefit from it.
There were other police officers on the scene and none of them fired their weapon, thinking it was a taser. Police officers tase people on daily basis, but shoot relatively few when they intend to tase them. Why is this police officer entitled to special treatment after making an error in judgment which caused death?
Bronzeage, I don't know how to communicate to you the reality of being in the situation where training (or, lack of it) causes particular outcomes regardless of intent.
It is like when you ask someone to say a particular thing so many times that when you ask them to say something similar, they say the first thing. This is not "their mistake", but rather the result of your priming.
Police get special treatment because they are TRAINED to be a way, disciplined into a particular response pattern. This response pattern is not voluntary and treating the result of it as if it were is not reasonable. This is not a hill you should wish to fall on.
This individual is even more fucked up by training, insofar as she is in every single class, doing all those drills not once, but repeatedly, with every student. What may be for some people congested by a bit of training, her training is downright overgrown.
You have seen me argue various cases. You know I do not "always" support police; I rarely support police. But there are police actions which I have seen that I think people go off the deep end on. This is one of them.
Certainly, her career as a cop needs to end. But your other judgements of her are most certainly unwarranted.
There is a context to these actions. They are the actions of someone in a reflexive response. They are the actions of someone who drives the same pattern on the same road every day day in and day out driving that way even on the one day they needed to go the other way on one of the critical intersections.
It isn't a choice. It isn't even really on the level of "mistake" but on the level of "expected human error resulting from a pattern of behavior".
Regular "selection drills" would break this kind of association. The one thing this shooting indicates is a direct and immediate need for this specific format of training.
It is not sexy. It is ot even immediately emotionally satisfying. It feels like such an unsatisfying compromise to let someone who was material to the cause of such an event not see "consequences" (revenge), but that's one of the reasons I know it is the right course of action here.
