Why does it take so long to get a guilty verdict in obvious cases? I am not a lawyer and TV has definitely not been an accurate representation of the law. So I'm hoping to get some clarification on things here: Today we learned that the person who committed the Parkland murders is pleading guilty, more than 3 1/2 years after the fact. The person guilty of the Charleston Church Shooting in July 2015 was finally convicted of it in December 2016, nearly 1 1/2 years after the fact. The person guilty of the Aurora theater shooting in July 2012 was finally convicted of it in July 2014, nearly 2 years after the fact. The person guilty of the Tree of Life shooting in October 2018 has still not been convicted nearly 3 years later. I understand the notion that it takes time to gather evidence, complete investigations, interview witnesses, etc. but in these described situations, said evidence is literally all right there. Furthermore, I am under the impression that when these types of attacks occur, a lot of resources are made available to expedite processing evidence. However, on the same note, when 30 survivors can all point at the same person and say, &quot;That's the jackass with the assault rifle,&quot;; and here's a whole live video feed of the attack; and here's their manifesto from their computer; and here's the police dash cam footage of when they arrested this person who was in full body armor. Part of me wonders, isn't that sufficient to get this done within 6 months? Are you wasting time getting DNA test results on each individual shell casing? Given that some of these convictions take more than 3 years to get, I have to wonder what the heck the prosecution is doing. Can someone explain to me the full process to help me make sense of these timelines? REQUEST TO EDITORS: PLEASE DO NOT EDIT IN NAMES OF ANY OF THESE SHOOTERS.
You've got four cases there with four different reasons for substantial delays: In the case of the Aurora theater shooting, the shooter pled not guilty by reason of insanity. There's no doubt about who did it, but doubt was raised about the mental status of the shooter. Murder is not a strict liability crime, so the ability of the defendant to form the intent to commit the crime is relevant. In the case of the Charleston church shooting, the defendant was twice evaluated for competence to stand trial. Again, no doubt about who did it, but most if not all jurisdictions require a defendant to be sufficiently sane to participate in their defense. In the case of the Parkland shooting, the initial delay was confusion over who the defense lawyer would be. Florida will only provide a public defender to someone who cannot afford their own defense lawyer, and it took nearly a year to determine that the defendant had inherited enough money to afford a private lawyer. Due to this delay, the trial was initially scheduled for mid-2020, which caused it to be delayed by the COVID-19 outbreak. In the case of the Tree of Life shooting, it appears to be straight-up delaying tactics by the defense. There are a great many motions, appeals of motions, requests for delay, and other things a lawyer can do to slow things down. Since the defendant is currently being held without bail, the prosecution probably isn't strongly motivated to speed things up.
First, as Mark Johnson said. Second, the job of police and prosecutors is not to put people into jail, their job is to put guilty people into jail. If you go to the police and tell them that you beat up a person, then before they investigate, they know that either you are guilty of assault, or you mistakenly believe that you are guilty of assault, or you are a phantasist who enjoys confessing non-existing crimes to the police. The police will either investigate which one it is, and may prosecute you either for assault or for wasting police time, or they may decide based on your behaviour that there was never any assault and not investigate further. I suspect they will at least question you about details of the claimed assault, to decide whether the crime is real or not.
The distinction being made here is far more subtle than it is made out to be in the article. There is a whole cottage industry of case law in almost every state (and under federal law) to determine which deadlines are jurisdictional and which are not. The case law is not uniform nationwide, and often, it isn't even consistent in seemingly analogous circumstances in a single state. The analysis is also more results driven than it is logical. And, it isn't unheard of for a state supreme court to decide that a deadline that lower courts have called jurisdictional for decades, but that the state supreme court has never had an occasion to consider, isn't jurisdictional after all and can be tolled. I've seen it happen more than once (although I don't have citations to those cases easily at hand). There may be practical importance to a parole officer deciding that the deadline has run. This might prevent the issue from ever being litigated. But, the person quoted in the article on that point is a non-lawyer government civil servant who isn't the person who will make the final call if the issue were ever litigated, something that would instead be handled by a senior lawyer in the California Attorney General's office. The author, like a lot of IT professionals and engineers, expects the law to be more consistent, logical, and predictable than it really is, and it so happens that this time he got lucky in his own case, so he thinks he's an expert.
We don't have enough facts to know. What Bob said about having violated the injunction, which could expose him to criminal contempt of court liability, was not true. But, the precise details of what he said, to whom he said it, and his relationship to the case, are not clear. Saying something that isn't true isn't always against the law, and even when it is against the law, the consequences depend upon the context. An intentionally false statement of fact to a police officer or to the court under oath would probably be a crime (but, unlike U.S. practice, criminal defendants who testify are not generally required to testify under oath). An unintentionally false statement of fact to the same persons (e.g. because Bob misheard the question or was drunk at the time and assumed that the statement of fact he was making was true or had dementia) would probably not have legal consequences for him. A mere confession - I am guilty of violating the civil injunction - would probably not be perjury or fraud because guilt of a civil injunction includes opinions and legal conclusions which are not actionable, as well as implied statements of fact, which might be actionable. But, if he confessed in the form of a plea, there probably wouldn't have been a trial at all. Once he made his plea, his factual guilty or innocence might be irrelevant in the face of a judicial admission. Courts can sometimes sanction parties to lawsuits for wasting everyone's time under quite specific circumstances, but we don't know precisely what relationship Bob has to the case in which the injunction was entered.
TV shows like COPS will have the arrestees/suspects/bystanders/victims sign a waiver to appear on the show, along with anybody else that they film in the process, otherwise the faces will be blurred, or removed from the show entirely. Additionally you can tell the camera crews that they are not allowed in your home. If they do enter your home without permission, you can sue them for trespassing. It should be noted that those shows are often edited for drama, and as such seem much more dramatic than it is. The film crews may spend weeks or more (400 hours of video) just to get enough "good stuff" for a 22 minute episode, and then make it look like it all happens over the course of an evening. As for the moral/social acceptance of a lack of privacy, that question really isn't on-topic here. This should be the same for any other "COPS-like" TV/youtube show, but there are some shows out there that don't take the rules as seriously as others. Those usually operate under the "who we are filming probably can't afford a lawyer" mentality so they keep going until they get sued.
Let's back up. It's premature to say that SB 8 &quot;avoids the constitutional restrictions on banning abortions&quot;. The constitutionality of SB 8 has not been resolved; the Supreme Court said so explicitly (page 2). In fact there is good reason to think that is unconstitutional under existing interpretation of the Constitution per Roe v. Wade and the like. (Whether the court will actually follow existing interpretation is another question, of course.) But the courts do not determine the constitutionality of laws just because someone asks them; they only do so when it needs to be decided to resolve a particular case. For instance, if a person is charged with a crime, they can challenge the constitutionality of the law under which they are charged, and courts will address that question unless the case is resolved some other way. There are also ways that a person who wants to violate the law can pre-emptively sue the government to prevent them from enforcing the law, if they can show such enforcement is likely to affect them. The issue in SB 8 is that since it wouldn't be the government enforcing the law, it's unclear who an abortion provider can pre-emptively sue. In Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson, they tried to sue the State of Texas, its courts, and a private party who they thought might be likely to sue them. The SCOTUS majority found that none of those defendants were relevant. However, if and when an abortion provider actually does get sued, there'll be a clear case which has proper parties and is ripe, and courts then will have to consider whether SB 8 is constitutional or not. So if your hypothetical gun control statute were treated similarly, the law might avoid pre-emptive challenges, with a chilling effect on gun sales. But sooner or later, someone would probably violate the law (maybe deliberately as a test case), and the courts would consider whether it was constitutional or not. Under prevailing interpretations of the Second Amendment, they'd probably find that it wasn't. A key difference, of course, is that abortions are much more time-sensitive than gun purchases; being temporarily blocked from having an abortion is much more consequential in most cases than being temporarily blocked from buying a gun. The other subtext is that, although SCOTUS said their decision in Whole Woman's Health is not based on the constitutionality of SB 8, it's widely suspected that several of the justices are not all that keen on the constitutional right to abortion found in Roe v. Wade, and might look to overturn Roe when it comes up. As such, they may not be very motivated to look for procedural avenues to block SB 8 in the short term, since they might be inclined to uphold it in the long term. The dissenters in Whole Woman's Health certainly thought those avenues were available. But in the case of your hypothetical gun control bill, if a majority of justices were pretty convinced that the law was unconstitutional, they might try harder to come up with grounds to block it pre-emptively.
Was This An Egregiously Lenient Sentence? Yes. Did he get lighter punishment than he &quot;should have&quot; (in some sense)? Yes. A six month sentence for a non-negligent homicide was virtually unprecedented then and remains extremely low. Even a six month sentence for the rape of an adult woman (which is generally a comparable or less serious offense than manslaughter) by a privileged white offender generates immense controversy today as it did in the case of the sentencing of Brock Turner for that offense in 2016 (something that ultimately cost the judge imposing that sentence his job). There is no way that intentionally hitting someone is negligent homicide. It is at a minimum reckless, and honestly, is hard to see as anything other than intentional conduct. While it wasn't premeditated and hence wouldn't qualify as first degree murder eligible for the death penalty, this would be a fairly straightforward case for a second degree murder charge and a sentence of a decade or more. The intentional part apples to the act of hitting someone, not the result of causing their death. This intent was present here. Where Did The System Fail? in what way did the legal process fail? Or do you think that there was any failure at all in the legal process? Was the substantive law at fault? No. The substantive criminal law in 1963 was very similar to what it is now and would have authorized a much more severe sentence on the crime of conviction and would have made a more serious charge of murder viable. Arguably the substantive law should have had a mandatory minimum sentence for homicide, but since judges very rarely impose such lenient charges for homicide in cases like this one where there was no good reason for leniency, many states don't do that now and it isn't a problem that legislators would reasonably have believed that they had to worry about. Allowing leniency in some extraordinary cases that capture considerations that the law does not expressly mention is often a good thing, rather than a bad one. Did The Appellate Process Fail? No. The defendant's conviction was not wrongfully reversed on appeal, and it is generally not possible for a defendant's sentence to be increased on appeal in these circumstances. Arguably, this is not an ideal rule of law (and it is not the law in most countries in these circumstances). But this was not a major problem with the legal system that was a primary reason causing the outcome in this case to be an exceptional miscarriage of justice. The Judge's Sentence Was An Abuse Of Discretion. The judge imposed a very light sentence within the statutorily allowed range of discretion. While we can't literally read the mind of the judge and the judge doesn't acknowledge this as a basis for the sentence, given a larger pattern of similarly lenient sentences of similarly situated people given light sentences by judges, we can make a very reasonable guess about the most likely and plausible reason for the lenient sentence. The most likely and plausible reason for the sentence is the one identified by Bob Dylan. A high status white man killed a low status black woman, and the judge felt that, as a result, it didn't justify as serious of a sentence. The actual chain of reasoning in the judge's mind consciously may have involved considerations like the view that the victim was an &quot;eggshell&quot; victim, and the likelihood that the defendant was capable of reforming his conduct after a short sentence and thus didn't present a threat to the public. But the courts very rarely grant leniency to someone on the grounds that the victim was &quot;fragile&quot; - usually this justifies a more severe sentence. And the documented fact that the perpetrator routinely assaulted others with his cane casts grave doubt on the extent to which he could be rehabilitated more easily than a typical defendant. Also, even if the charge of conviction was manslaughter, this case would have been considered at the high end of the range in terms of the culpability of the offender who went around assaulting many people at a public gathering seriously enough to cause harm, and to in one case cause a death of a more fragile victim. The sentence should have been at least at the midpoint of what is allowed (currently about five years out of ten possible) in a case like this one. Further, while Maryland is not in the &quot;Deep South&quot; it is a Southern state with a history of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination, and the judge in this case would have lived under and seen enforced to his benefit, Jim Crow laws in Maryland during his lifetime. The Civil Rights movement had not succeeded to the point that racism was a completely disavowed and unacceptable form of motivation in 1963, particularly in even parts of the South outside of the &quot;Deep South&quot; at that time. As a reference point, President Biden, in nearby Delaware, was starting to make a name for himself in politics at the time as a defender of segregation in the school system and an opponent of busing to desegregate schools. This issue got him elected and re-elected. Biden reformed his views later, but racism was alive and well in Chesapeake Bay area at the time. Was Prosecutorial Discretion An Issue? Possibly To Some Extent. The prosecution's decision to press charges for manslaughter rather than murder was also questionable, but less obviously so. Today, common practice would be to bring both murder and manslaughter charges in a case like this one. The facts would have supported a second degree murder charge. The fact that the prosecution originally brought a murder charge suggests that it knew that the facts supported that charge, and was influenced by some political or tactical consideration, or by judicial pressure, to drop the more serious charge before trial. But without insight into what that reason was (which is much less obvious than the judge's motivations) it is hard to judge whether the prosecutor should have acted differently under the circumstances. The fact that the prosecution pressed charges, took the case to trial, and got a conviction at all also suggests that the prosecutor's conduct was not at the bottom of the barrel compared to more racist prosecutor exercises of discretion in 1963 elsewhere in the U.S. The prosecutor had the full legal ability to decline to press charges at all without facing any legal consequences for failing to do so. Further, while it is certainly plausible that prosecutor's racism figured into this decision, it is also important to note that the prosecutor has to consider the attitudes of a likely jury pool when bringing charges. Even if the prosecutor believes that the defendant is guilty of murder under the law, the prosecutor has to consider whether the odds of getting a conviction from a local jury that is likely to have considerable racial bias influences what charges are right to bring in order to get a maximum conviction, as opposed to what charges the prosecutor believes are legally justified. Likewise, if the judge indicated the he would be likely to dismiss the murder charge before trial in a preliminary hearing, that would also make a prosecutor's decision to comply with an implicit judicial suggestion to stay in the judge's good graces for the remainder of this case, and for future cases before the same judge, understandable. However, if electoral public pressure, or the defense counsel's pressure or influence, caused the prosecutor to give up on a murder charge that a conviction would probably have been secured upon, this is much more problematic and would suggest racial and status bias on the part of the prosecuting attorney's office. Was Jury Conduct An Issue? No. The conduct of the jury in this case was not an issue, even though the potential of jury nullification that didn't happen was a factor that may have influenced the charge brought by the prosecution. The jury convicted the defendant on the most serious charge presented to it.
In the US, it depends on the jurisdiction because each state has its own homicide statutes: but, the defining elements don't differ a lot. Drawing on Washington state law, the first question is whether you intended to kill a person (it doesn't have to be a specific person). If you did, you have committed first-degree murder. It is first-degree murder, because it requires a certain amount of advance planning to kill with a drone. It does not matter that the drone houses the gun that killed the person and a program determines when the gun fires (the "it was the drone, not me" defense gets you nowhere: otherwise, you could always claim "It wasn't me, it was my gun / knife / fist".) If instead this is a badly-designed pig-slaughtering drone, then it could be manslaughter in the first degree, if the act was reckless, or manslaughter in the second degree, if the act was with criminal negligence. To determine which it is, you look at the definitions: A person is reckless or acts recklessly when he or she knows of and disregards a substantial risk that a wrongful act may occur and his or her disregard of such substantial risk is a gross deviation from conduct that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation. versus A person is criminally negligent or acts with criminal negligence when he or she fails to be aware of a substantial risk that a wrongful act may occur and his or her failure to be aware of such substantial risk constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation. So it would depend on whether you decided that safeguards which would prevent shooting people were too much bother (you know there is a risk and set aside that concern), or it didn't occur to you that a flying gun might hurt a person.