I will offer a simple observation about how these cases with shootings in America, particularly involving police, play out.
This is a sad, simple story. A man in his own abode, through no fault of his own, just living his life and doing nothing wrong, was shot and killed. That should never happen. It isn't complicated.
The discussion of these issues, even here on a freethought blog where logic and reason vary significantly from other settings, principally shifts to trying to explain, solely from the perspective of the shooter, why this may or may not have been an excusable event. Did the shooter have some tenable reason to feel a threat, regardless of the perspective of the victim? That is the metric American society has allowed to be applied.
It should be simple. You can't shoot people who have done nothing wrong. You are an obvious societal risk who takes a life when not needed. We as society should demand that you account for the life you took.
But that's not how it works.
At a bare minimum, this is manslaughter. The shooter negligently attempted to enter the wrong apartment. Her genuine belief that she was not wrong as to whose apartment it was may show she did not act with intent, but doesn't excuse the negligence which created the event. At best, it was a negligent taking of life due to the shooter's failure to reasonably determine the apartment was not her own.
Yet the discussion will all turn on whether her killing should be excused. "She didn't know." "It was a mistake." "He scared her." Goodness forbid anyone actually care that a guy minding his own business at home was needlessly killed.
