Someone Really Must Love Their SUV

[Thomas Rogers]

You missed the point, Caymen. The line isn't about what actions are acceptable. Clearly throwing eggs, or apples, or stones, or paint balls is unacceptable and shouldn't be tolerated. No one decides that one vs the other is okay.



But people should decide with some level on control and constraint what is acceptable punishment for each of these. The "line" has more to do with the punishment.



Case in point: What is the correct punishment for a teen that throws an egg at your car?



A: Report it to the police and or their parents and hold the parents liable for any damages.



That's it folks. No beatings...no hitting them with paint balls, no shooting them to kill. There is one and only one acceptable punishment for kids vandalising your car. And I submit if anyone here thinks differently, well then, seek counseling, cause you probably have anger or societal participation issues.



TJR

 

[Bill V]

TJR--Let me be clear. I would never commit the violent acts against egg throwers that have been discussed here--including those who nearly killed me.



But I am not going to find fault with those who would. And I an not going to shed any tears for those egg throwers that have karma hit them back with some extra vigor.

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Bill V, I find that sad.



Seriously!



To not find fault with the guy that kills a kid that eggs his car, or to not feel some level of sympathy for the kids that were killed seems to me to be, well, callous and cold. For that I feel sadness.



It is part of that "they got what was coming to them" mentality that just seems so foreign to me. They DID NOT get what was coming to them...they got SO MUCH MORE than that, and the person that GAVE it to them committed a far worse offense.



TJR

 

[Bill V]

TJR, it all depends on how you view their act. You keep talking about it as "egging a car". But from my personal actual experience, and from the very realistic hypothetical situations expressed by others in this thread, the proper term for what these kids did is "attempted murder". And since it sounds like you've not yet experienced it, let me fill you in--once you've been the target of an attempted murder, you tend to not have as much sympathy for those who commit that act, particularly for those who attempt it via the same means as your attempt was.



(And I can almost see the rebuttal to this, that these kids did not attempt to murder me, because there was no intent for me to die. Well, per most-if-not-all states, if someone dies because of an act that happened during the commission of another crime (including egg-throwing), it's not manslaughter, it's murder. So yes, this does count as attempted homicide.)

 

[Thomas Rogers]

BillV, actually, I did use the word "intent" several times. Yes, you guessed my rebuttal.



I'm sorry, but do you think the kids intent was murder? For there to be an "attempted murder", murder, in fact, has to be the intent.



This is EXACTLY why punishment should not be served vigalante style. Many people are incable of the appropriate level of restraint.



And, I am pretty sure you have your definition of manslaughter and murder mixed up. Murder does in fact require intent and pre-meditation. Yes, in many states commission of a VIOLENT CRIME that results in a death can warrant a murder charge...but egging a car is not a violent crime.



That whole line of "And since it sounds like you've not yet experienced it, let me fill you in--once you've been the target of an attempted murder, you tend to not have as much sympathy for those who commit that act"....nice debate tactic. But I'm not buying it. Of course I have no sympathy for attempted murders. But egging a car is NOT attempted murder. It just isn't.



I'm sorry if something happened in your past to make you not see reality clearly (no jab there, but to think that egging a car is attempted murder is not seeing things clearly), but as I said, you might want to seek some help with that. I am serious.



TJR

 

[Jake Levin]

I really don't want to jump in the middle of this, but why would "egging a car" not be a violent crime? Last time I checked throwing items at people or their posessions, whether it's an egg, a rock, a piece of wood, a fist, the intent is to harm or damage. That makes it a violent crime.

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Good point, Jlevin. I don't know for sure. I assumed it isn't. Anyone got a legal textbook definition of "violent crime" handy? I always thought it included the words "depraved indifference" and "intent to harm", etc...



I disagree that the intent is to harm or damage when it's kids throwing eggs. Having thrown stuff at cars in my day as a kid (not proud of it, and my kids know better as did I), I can tell you, that was never the intent.



I will look it up and get back to you if I find anything.



TJR

 

[Jake Levin]

Tom, you're right in that the kids probably didn't think "let's go throw some eggs at people and see who we can hurt or what we can damage". Just like you I've been there done that as well (and I'm not proud of it either). I know when we did this, no one I was with was thinking that was why we did it, but then again looking back now, I can't even think why we would do something stupid like this.



I don't condone the killing of this kid in question, but what he was doing could have led to the death of someone he was doing it to. Problem is kids (and a large number of adults) don't think about the consequences of their actions.

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Here is what I found, Dept of Justice FBI website (the web link is below):

Violent Crime - Definition:



Violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. According to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s definition, violent crimes involve force or threat of force.

That compelled me to seek the definition of Murder and Aggravated Assault (rape and robbery seemed to not apply):

Murder - Definition:



The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program defines murder and nonnegligent manslaughter as the willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another.



The classification of this offense is based solely on police investigation as opposed to the determination of a court, medical examiner, coroner, jury, or other judicial body. The UCR Program does not include the following situations in this offense classification: deaths caused by negligence, suicide, or accident; justifiable homicides; and attempts to murder or assaults to murder, which are scored as aggravated assaults.





Aggravated Assault - Definition:



The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program defines aggravated assault as an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. The Program further specifies that this type of assault is usually accompanied by the use of a weapon or by other means likely to produce death or great bodily harm. Attempted aggravated assault that involves the display of—or threat to use—a gun, knife, or other weapon is included in this crime category because serious personal injury would likely result if the assault were completed. When aggravated assault and larceny-theft occur together, the offense falls under the category of robbery.

Note that the definition of Murder includes the words "willfull" and "non-negligent", and the definition of Aggravated Assault includes the words "purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury".



These definitions get back to what I stated before. If the intent (e.g. will or purpose) isn't to hurt or harm a person, then it can't be a violent crime of murder or aggravated assault, even if the result is that the person dies.



It's right there folks.



Egging a car is not a violent crime, and it is not attempted murder...unless the intent in egging the car was to actually hurt or kill someone, which could be argued I guess, and sure, I can guess we all can debate the whole notion of "how is the responder supposed to know what the INTENT is?"...again, that' gets back to my point that this is why punishment isn't up to the victim.



TJR

 

[Jake Levin]

Maybe we should go back to Hammurabi's Code

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Right, jlevin75, we want buoyancy to determine guilt and innocence. Given my BMI I would be able to get away with a lot (read: I'm fat, fat floats).

 

[Bill V]

The crime doesn't need to be violent, nor does there need to be intent, for the associated death to be classified as murder. Think of a drunken driving death. Definitely no attempt to kill, but I think it's pretty uniformly prosecuted as homicide. Same goes for deaths that are associated with things like non-violent acts of organized crime. If you're fleeing a cop, run into someone, they hit their head on the concrete and die, it's a homicide.

 

[Jake Levin]

Tom, I'm in the same boat as you!

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Bill V, Now you introduce the term homicide. Homicide is a general term for killing (see the wiki).



Homicide covers both murder in its various degrees, and manslaughter (both voluntary and involuntary).



So, yes, a prank that results in a death might very well merit an involuntary manslaughter charge, but it should never result in a murder charge. Of course either charges deals with a homicide.



Put another way: all crimes that result in a death are homicides. Not all crimes that result in deaths are murders.



So, to review, a prank that ends in an accidental death = "involuntary manslaughter", NOT "attempted murder". Murder and manslaughter are both homicides.



Are we good?



TJR

 

[TomT]

I agree. If the driver had run off the road and killed himself or somebody else then the teenagers actions would be considered manslaughter and we would be talking about a serious offense. From what I have heard though, that was not the case. Nor was there any report of damage to the SUV. So there was absolutely no justification for the drivers actions. It will be an interesting case when they arrest the jerk. He will no doubt be prosecuted for murder and it will be interesting to see how his lawyer tries to prove to a jury that he was acting in self-defense.

 

[Bill V]

Not really. I mean, yeah, we're good, in that there's no hard feelings at all regarding how this conversation is going, and that I'm enjoying this "just talking". But no, I'm not agreeing with what you're saying about the definition of murder. I might have been using the wrong terms--but I know that in the examples I gave, charges have been brought that have been murder, not manslaughter. I was incorrectly equating the terms homicide and murder, so I take that back, but that doesn't change the fact that these have been prosecuted not as manslaughters, but as murders.

 

[Richard Kolb]

I stopped reading these about half way down, but here is my $0.02.



1. Should these kids have been throwing eggs? No.

2. Do they deserve to be punished? Yes.

3. In all reality it today's society would they have been punished? In my opinion not enough and probably not at all.

4. Now that someone shot someone will people start paying more attention to stupid stuff like this and punishing them or stopping it sooner? Probably.

5. Did the kids really deserve to get shot? Probably not.



This is like the guy who shot the neighbors kid for walking on his lawn. The reports were that the guy had called the police and complained about this kid ruining his lawn for years. The police and the parents wouldn't do anything about it, so now the kid is dead. Had they done something about it the kid would be alive today. I had a similar problem with my neighbors, before this happened the police wouldn't do anything, after it happened they were willing to show up and charge them with criminal trespass. Our society has taken the attitude that kids will be kids too far and unfortunatly it takes examples like this to get people to start holding kids accountable for their actions.

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Kids have been egging cars for decades.



This isn't a new problem and is not something that just started happening and is a sign of the "bad kids of today." So the thought that this will send a signal to the parents and the "out of control youth of today" is misguided, because these particular youth are no more out of control than their parents or grandparents. Sure, if the kids were doing something so out-of-control, and so new the likes of which we haven't seen before, then SURE, I would agree a message might be taken from this. However, that wasn't the case here.



If anything, the signal that this incident sends is that people are wound too friggin' tight. And many so much so that they can say: Yup, they got what they deserve...I'd have done the same!



TJR

 

[2]

TJR, have you had to clean up the after-egging mess on paint? My house was egged a few halloweens ago. I never noticed till about a week later. All the paint peeled off when the temps went above freezing. A harmless prank? I had to repaint the front of my house. Lots of fun. The next halloween I sat in the bushes with a paint-ball gun, but no-one showed up.

 

[Thomas Rogers]

Olaf,



Note that I never said "harmless prank" in any of my posts. I'm sorry you had to repaint your house. I am glad it was a paint-ball gun that you had at the ready the next year and not a real gun.



Still, did you ever consider that as you were hiding in the dark bushes with a gun (toy or not) you might get spied by a passerby that calls the police. Then, the police show up, and they draw their real guns and call you out. Maybe in the commotion they see the paintball gun and unload on you. No, of course you didn't think of that. Just like those egging your house weren't thinking that it would damage the paint.



People do stupid things and use bad judgement all the time. They shouldn't be killed for it. Though I guess Darwin would say different.



TJR