Here's an excerpt from a case in Kansas specifically mentioning depraved-heart murder. Important part in italics.
> "Depraved heart second-degree murder requires a conscious disregard of the risk, sufficient under the circumstances, to manifest extreme indifference to the value of human life. Recklessness that can be assimilated to purpose or knowledge is treated as depraved heart second-degree murder, and less extreme recklessness is punished as manslaughter. Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. This language describes a kind of culpability that differs in degree but not in kind from the ordinary recklessness required for manslaughter."
So yes, you still need to show proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this was a prank gone wrong. Unless the accused called assassins, it's going to be hard to argue intent.
So, having begun your argument with the claim that only "involuntary manslaughter" would be available to prosecutors, because (not that I follow this logic) they'd be missing "malice aforethought", you've now become an expert on how Kansas evaluates gross recklessness?
I'm approaching this with no emotion and pre-judgement but based on facts. Let's take a look at what really happened:
> According to the article, allegedly two Call of Duty players were threatening each other over a $2 bet. One call of duty member gives the other a fake address when the other threatens to SWAT him. Police go to the fake address and shoot somebody. Guy who got shot couldn't have possibly prevented the situation and is ironically the least at fault of anybody involved.
There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill, in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
Involuntary manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought.
Of course I'm not a lawyer but I refrain from allowing emotions to taint the lens of truth. I've yet to see any constructive counter arguments from you, instead you've sidetracked the debate by attacking my character.
This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me?
> This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me?
No, in the example you've presented, that is directly demonstration of intent to kill using a device (a gun) that has high probability of death. That is not the point I've made and you are attempting to bend what was said.
Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.
"There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill"
It does not require that they "intended to kill." It just requires that they "acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life." You find it hard to believe that anyone could consider it reckless (and indifferent to the life of the victim) to send a team of gunmen, who you've explicitly instructed to be on high alert?
Prosecutors will get to describe the crime in any frame they choose, and a jury of humans will get to decide whether it's murder.
Assuming this player is in an extraditable country, I predict he's going to rot in jail for the rest of his life. It's not like he was playing CoD through TOR. He won't be hard to find.
People already have the gamer tags of the two people involved in the shooting (the swatter and the person he was intending to swat, but who gave a false address) and even have tweets from the alleged perpetrator (now deleted) who claimed he wasn't responsible.
So yes, it's a very short matter of time before police start knocking.
> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill
Who are you trying to fool here?
Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting. If it weren't, they would have called family and child services to fraudulently report child sex abuse, animal control to report an escaped rabid panther, or any number of other government bodies that don't show up to the party with fully-automatic assault rifles.
There is no fooling just sequence of facts and events you are denying.
The victim was shot because he refused direct police order and endangered himself by making the SWAT thinking he had a gun.
The guy calling the SWAT is an effete asshole but there's no way he could've predicted the endangerment that the victim put on himself by directly refusing orders to keep his hand up (he didnt and he was shot thinking he was pulling a gun).
So if you wanted to prove intent to kill, you'd have to
1) Show the probability of getting killed by SWAT vs Hitman is the same, which the judge will throw out as intent.
2) Show that the SWAT caller could've predicted that victim would put himself in danger by disobeying a direct armed officer.
3) Retrospectively show intent to kill in previous SWAT calls the perpetrator has been charged for.
This is just the harsh realities of court. It's very hard for prosecutors for cases like this, especially when the public is so skewed to one version of the story. It's ironic that such zealous energy from the mob crowd will only hurt the case, the internet and the mob mentality doesn't prevail against examination of facts and evidence....
Hence this is why I stopped pursuing a legal career...because I realized that true justice will rarely be delivered. To convict someone, you need more than just conjectures and emotional response, you are up against highly intelligent defense lawyers who are expert in raising doubts in those that react with emotion, not logic.
>Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting
Nonsense. The point is to cause incredible inconvenience to the victim, not to kill them. Most of the time the cops will probably waste a few hours of your day, and make you look pretty bad in front of your neighbors.
This is quite possibly the first death after thousands of swattings, it seems unreasonable to assume that the perpetrators wouldn't be aware of how rarely this actually happens.
It seems like you've just completely blocked the possibility that this case will not go your way. You've repeatedly denied facts and evidences present in this tragedy, that a) calling SWAT will never be accepted as calling a hitman therefore no intent lies in itself other than pranking b) the victim was killed because he disobeyed an armed officer c) restrospectively prove intent to kill in all previous swat cases, which will have wide reaching political ramifications that go beyond just the individuals involved. d) the victim was unknown to the accused therefore impossible to claim any sort of aforethought and intent which both requires evidence.
So when you react with such vulgar statements and continually attack others who present facts and evidences against your conjecture, it's hard to take you seriously.
You keep thinking the accused somehow had blood lust without even looking at all the pieces. It's so easy to jump on the bandwagon, but there's always those that choose logic over passion, this is what the legal industry is about.
Sending armed officers to someone's house under the pretense that the resident is an armed threat does not result in 'inconvenience.' Inconvenience is a hundred pizza guys being sent to your house delivering stuff you didn't order.
This may be the first death as the direct result of a prank call, but it is far from the first accidental death as the result of a swat team being deployed.
If inconvenience were truly the goal, a prank call to child services that launches an investigation would work much better. But that's not the outcome the caller actually wants to see happen.
Sending in armed officers with the assumption that the victim will disobey direct police orders and get himself killed is a mental gymnastic that only lies within your head. It does not belong in the courts because there's no way to prove intent without evidence. Conjectures are not accepted in court.
Of the many and varied lies that could be told to cause incredible inconvenience through the medium of misinformed police, only a few will trigger a SWAT team.
SWAT teams are not deployed by the police when they think that it is likely that they will need to behave inconveniently to someone, they are deployed when the police think that it is likely that there will be a need for overwhelming deadly force.
The point of falsely triggering a SWAT team is not to cause inconvenience through police.
The point of triggering a SWAT team is to deliberately risk someone's life.
Great white sharks rarely eat people.
However, if I admit to having deliberately pushed someone into the water with a great white shark to see what would happen and then they get eaten, quoting the probabilities is not going to impress a court very much.
> The point of triggering a SWAT team is to deliberately risk someone's life.
Unfortunately, it wasn't as if the SWAT team were going in guns blazing. The victim specifically chose to put his hands down when ordered to keep it up. He failed to do so and that resulted in his death.
Seeing the huge number of SWAT cases, this is the first time that I'm aware of, where a person has been deceased. To make the argument that calling SWAT team to somebody's house is akin to calling a hitman to your house is ludicrious.
The case falls further apart because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved, there's no way they could've predicted the victim would disobey police orders that put himself in danger.
> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill
“malice aforethought”, as noted uphtread, isn't the same thing as “intent to kill”. Gross recklessness/depraved indifference is also malice aforethought.
> in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
SWATting is a “prank” which inherently involves the mental state of depraved indifference; the fact that the target endangered is different than the one the “prankster” expected is fairly immaterial.
Intent to kill was used as the original reasoning from parent's post which I refuted with logic and reasoning that was met with an attack on my character and "malice aforethought" which still requires proof that calling SWAT == calling HITMAN, was thrown without understanding the full sequence of events that led up to the event.
The victim was killed because he disobeyed direct orders from an armed officer. At the end of the day, this is what boils down to, not what he said or she said.
As I said, calling SWAT to somebodys house is not the same as calling hitman to whack somebody. Even in cases involving spouses calling hitman on their estranged lover, it takes an awful lot of evidence to get a malice aforethought and even more damning evidence to get intent to kill.
This is just the reality of working under a legal system that relies on evidence presentable to a neutral third party. If anything, the internet mob mentality will hurt this case as the judge will throw out anything related to the notion the prank caller technically called armed hitman, because the prosecutor will need to show evidence that the accused knew the target victim would willingly disobey armed police officer, which is impossible because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved.
Plenty of people that had no intention to kill someone end up in jail for homicide after they do something that they didn't believe was going to kill the other party. SWATing wouldn't be a threat if there wasn't some (small) chance that someone gets hurt. Kind of like how pushing someone at a bar doesn't always end in death, but when the guy you push hits his head on a barstool on the way down and cracks his skull open, it's homicide.
> "Depraved heart second-degree murder requires a conscious disregard of the risk, sufficient under the circumstances, to manifest extreme indifference to the value of human life. Recklessness that can be assimilated to purpose or knowledge is treated as depraved heart second-degree murder, and less extreme recklessness is punished as manslaughter. Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. This language describes a kind of culpability that differs in degree but not in kind from the ordinary recklessness required for manslaughter."
So yes, you still need to show proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this was a prank gone wrong. Unless the accused called assassins, it's going to be hard to argue intent.