The extent of criminal liability?

You have to realise that the minute your behavior turns criminal the laws set in place to protect the public get considered.

Look at DUI, if a drunk is behind the wheel of a car and hits another vehicle, due to his or her negligance, killing the occupant the drunk will be charged with their death. EVEN if it is reasonable to conclude the accident could have happened if both drivers were sober. Say the driver took their eyes off the road for a second, could have done the same thing if not over the legal limit.

This helicopter chash is an unfortunated circumstance that was precipitated by criminal behavior.

 

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Poor comparison. In your example the second driver was clearly impeded by the drunk, in a very direct way, in that case there is obvious liability. But for crying out loud, two helicopters flying up above are not in any way impeded by the driver. Their ability to fly safely was not in anyway affected by the drivers actions.

 

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It does not matter. Have you heard that there are different degrees of murder charges?

First degree murder to manslaughter-voluntary and involuntary.

 

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And yet you've still failed to explain how the helicopter pilots did not have 100% responsibility for the safety of themselves and their passenger. In what way did the driver impede them?

If they were covering a sporting event, like say a rally, and two helicopters crashed, is the rally-driver responsible? No. Just because the driver in this case was running from the police doesn't suddenly make him responsible.

 

Unless the sporting event is criminal then NO. That is key to this (OP) scenario.

Here is another scenario:

A mom goes out on a crack binge and leaves her kid at home alone for three days, the kid dies and the mom gets charged. A mom has dementia and leaves her kid alone for three days= no charges. I will tell you this- once behavior crosses the line into criminal there are whole new set of rules...ie. your F*****.

 

The fact that the driver is a criminal or a rally driver makes no difference.

 

I said the vent is criminal\illegal and in the case above it is 'DURING the comission of a crime'. This is the law and i do not make the laws.

The bottom line is this: the driver stole a vehicle and instead of stopping to pay for his crime like a man he ran and caused the death of these pilots. he stopped=NO DEAD PEOPLE. I dont know what the outcome of this will be, all i am saying is that more than likely the driver (evading police) will have additional charges considered.

 

Suppose I rob a bank. Two news vans crash into each other because the van drivers were rushing to cover the story. Am I responsible for their deaths?

Here's another one: Suppose my friends crash and die because they saw me pulled over on the side of the road and were too busy trying to see what was happening with me and the cop to pay attention to the road? Am I responsible for their deaths? If not, what is the difference between my hypothetical scenario and this guy's situation with the cops?

 

If you were parked illegally then John99 would say yes you are responsible for their deaths. It's black & white thinking.

 

I'm starting to wonder if laws such as ARS 13-1105 weren't crafted in order to make it easier for the police to "do their jobs". Along the highway near my apartment, you can see the police speeding along, weaving through traffic, driving in oncoming lanes, and all without emergency lights. Hell, cops have honked at me to get out of their way. I don't see what's so hard, when they're going somewhere they need to be, about using the emergency lights they were given for that very purpose. Point being, if a cop doesn't feel like doing his job properly, and someone gets killed because he's speeding along without siren or lights, you don't need to have a messy investigation because the death would be, under such a statute, the fault of whoever was doing whatever wrong.

Imagine this one. It's a story I've told before. A few years ago, a teenage intern at the Seattle Police Department, well liked by the officers and administration, but also depressed in part because his father was a cop slain in the line of duty, decided one day to steal a police car. He just grabbed the keys, walked out to the motor pool, and took off. He didn't go gonzo, just drove around town. It took a while for any response to develop, in part because people weren't sure whether to call 911 or what to tell them. In the end, though, the police went Gonzo. Receiving reports of a stolen police vehicle, they flooded the streets and essentially went nuts. The whole thing came to its climax when several police cars came together at an intersection, blocking another unit. Officers from the several got out of their cars and started shooting. Literally, people nearby were diving for cover, grabbing their children and trying to get the hell out. The police riddled the suspect car, and when they were satisfied that the job was done, they found inside a police officer, alive, unhurt, and scared shitless: they shot up the wrong car.

Now, just work with me here. They had no idea who or what they were shooting at. They had no reason to be shooting. They got extremely lucky that nobody (anywhere) was hurt. And it seems that because of that, the incident was treated as an embarrassing "no big deal" sort of thing. Nobody was ever fired or otherwise disciplined that I heard about.

Several officers, unloading, reloading, and going again. Wrong target.

Imagine for a moment that someone had been killed. Had we a statute like Arizona's, the depressed kid would have been charged with first degree murder.

As it was, the kid eventually returned the car to the motor pool.

 

Do you have any kind of website link to that story? Or did you just make it up like you seem to do with lots of other posts that you make?

I don't believe one single bit of that stupid-ass story!

Baron Max

 

I remember reading about it. Tiassa & I live in Seattle.

 

Digging for a link that's three or four years old at least is a bit of a challenge. If I find anything, Baron, I'll let you know. In the meantime, will you at least give Zanket a bit of credibility?

 

I hope so.

I explained this six times in this thread already.

 

Two people can't fly helicopters, and we're blaming someone else for their blunders. Ummm....

 

Just for you, Baron

Ah ... here's one of the accounts from the Seattle Times during the aftermath of the July, 2001 incident:

Then yesterday at about 1:30 a.m., two officers in a car downtown spotted a patrol car near Third Avenue and James Street. The driver was clearly not a cop, police said. But he was wearing clothes with police insignia.

The officers chased the stolen police car north to the Eastlake area. But they lost sight of the fleeing cruiser, which had its lights and siren turned on, before he reached the crest of the hill at East Roanoke Street and Harvard Avenue East on Capitol Hill.

When they topped the hill, the officers saw another patrol car, which turned out to be a lone officer from the East Precinct. They thought it was the suspect and rammed him with their car.

The East Precinct officer, in turn, thought he was being rammed by the police imposter. He fired at the other patrol car. The officers in that car fired back. Luckily, police said, every shot missed.

Kerlikowske defended the officers, saying they had a right to defend themselves, believing they were being shot at. (SeattleTimes.com)​

 

Does any of the following make sense to you Tiassa?

Sad to see the state of civilization when someone can sue a restaurant for serving hot coffe that THEY end up spilling on their leg and it is no big deal. Society being held hostage by greedy, outraegous litigation is part of life now.

From your other post:

Someone steals a police car and speeds through the streets with sirens blaring, putting everyone in danger and attempts to ram into another car (oh, but he missed

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) that is OK. So the cops use lethal force to stop him to prevent him from killing someone then that is a problem?

 

It was a real cop, not the imposter, who rammed another police car.

 

See Zanket's point above.

In the meantime, though the kid peacefully and surreptitiously returned the vehicle to the pool, if someone died in the cops' shootout, should he have been charged with first-degree murder?

We know what the Arizona statute says. It's not a big enough deal for me to look up the one in Washington. The point being that, while certain intents of the statute might make sense, it's a ridiculous one. There is a difference between the examples we've been considering.

• Cops in a chase accidentally hit another vehicle, kill someone. This death can reasonably be attributed to the suspect, but first degree murder? Manslaughter will do. The statute seems vicious in that case, to be used as a weapon to make the righteous feel better.

• News helicopters collide, crash while covering a police chase. The statute in Arizona makes these deaths the problem of the suspect, but as the vote suggests, such a standard might well cross the line of common sense. People seem to be having a hard time accepting that someone else's negligence should be your problem.

• Guy shares marijuana with friend, chokes on a hit, falls down stairs; friend is guilty of first degree murder? The example is constructed to isolate the "murderer". It wasn't even his dope or pipe. It wasn't his house. Two people consent to commit a crime together, how is the one responsible for the other falling down the stairs? The answer, of course, is only by statute.

• Police panic, discharge weapons at wrong suspect. Should the suspect be held accountable for what's taking place blocks away? I mean, the cops who did the ramming didn't really do much to confirm their target after they lost sight and "reacquired" the suspect.​

Let's think about that last one for a moment. A depressed teenager doing something stupid should wind up charged with first degree murder because one cop shot another while the kid was parking the car?

It sounds good to many of us when we're angry. Just like people complaining about Bush. Yes, I think he's a war criminal, but if it ever came to executing the man for his crimes, I'd be willing to bet his road to the gallows would be painted with extraneous appeals to emotion, exaggerations beyond belief, and the kind of neurotic self-righteousness quite common among Americans. Jeez, in New York when the cops killed a guy for not having drugs on him, Mayor Giuliani opened a sealed juvenile file, exposed an arrest never charged for shoplifting, and called the victim a career criminal. Now, maybe the cops aren't lying. Maybe Dorismond, wrapped up in a scuffle, could hear the inbound cop screaming and cussing at him. Maybe some bystander did tell Dorismond to get his assailant's gun. But for heaven's sake, it wasn't necessary to tar and feather the dead in order to make the cops look like angels. Especially since nobody believes cops are angels.

Did somebody do something wrong? Fine, let's "get 'im". But we don't need lynch mobs, and we don't need to take "justice" to such extremes that you are held responsible for other people's negligence. If that's why the statute was crafted, it needs to go. If that's how it's being applied despite more sensible intentions in its invention, the people pushing the application need to go screw.

 

If the suspect's mother had not given birth to him, then the collision would not have taken place. Perhaps we should charge the suspect's mother with two counts of 1st degree murder as well.

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