Aguila Blanca said:
My position remains that -- in general -- manslaughter is when someone kills another person without intending to kill them.
My understanding is that manslaughter requires criminal/culpable negligence. It's not simply any negligent killing of someone else without intent, or every civil wrongful death lawsuit would have a potential companion criminal charge. Civil lawsuits are always available to address simple mistakes in the absence of intent to do something which creates a specific risk where that risk is known.
The narrow issue of whether weapons confusion qualifies as criminal negligence is hotly disputed. There have been other taser confusion cases and they generally, though I'm not sure about all, result in involuntary manslaughter convictions. The question is, are those convictions legally justified? Analogies don't work very well; ordinary private citizens don't have this problem, since they carry guns or tasers but not both—except for a very small number of people who, one might argue, are playing cop.
It's one thing to say that guns create an enhanced duty of care such that any harm resulting from handling one is either intentional or criminally negligent. It's quite another thing to say that cops tasked with carrying both a firearm and a taser are criminally negligent if they confuse the two, which are both clearly gun-like, in a reactive situation.
I don't see how criminal liability applies, or what it accomplishes, in these cases. It's a cop training or department policy problem. Blaming cops seems like it makes it more likely to re-occur, because when it happens a department can say that the real responsibility lies with the stupid officer who drew the wrong weapon.
Criminal liability implies the cop was intentionally doing something wrong, even though they didn't intentionally draw the gun (that would be intentional homicide).
Isn't there a simple, logical policy and training program that would avoid all this? Tasers are not for reactive situations, period. If a cop doesn't have time to think taser, look at the taser, identify the taser, and finally draw, then what in the hell are they doing drawing a taser instead of a gun? Maybe tasers simply aren't appropriate. Maybe cops should go back to pepper spray, and departments should replace the extensive taser training and refreshers, that would be required to avoid weapon confusion cases, with grappling classes.
5whiskey hasn't drawn a taser in however many years of being a cop and resorting to an occasional fist-fight.
Perhaps tasers were a neat idea that don't really have a place, given their rather questionable effectiveness (probe spread, defeated by heavy clothing, some people simply less affected than others) even when they're fully functional, given weapon confusion due to their gun-like design, and given their non-zero lethality. In their defense, both fatality and serious injury rates from tasers are far lower than from guns, but significantly above pepper spray due to cardiac risks from the shocks, typically falling injuries (akin to fist-fight knockouts), and barb-related injuries. A LA times report from the 90's showed 61 fatalities nationally, 27 in California, resulting from police use of pepper spray between 1990 and 1995.
https://archive.fo/vqSOc — Tasers, as far as I can tell, are several times more than that, but getting a good figure would require rates of death relative to deployments, not just comparison over the same number of years, and I think those data would be hard to come by.
Aguila Blanca said:
Being unprepared to do the job you're paid to do is, in my view, a conscious choice.
Doesn't that open a lot of people up to manslaughter charges whenever they fail in their professional capacity and people die? To use some recent examples, the engineers who designed (not the inspectors, who in theory might be criminally negligent) the FIU bridge and Champlain Towers South are all criminally negligent under your legal theory. Traditionally, civil courts handle that. That's the reason people argue about this. It creates a special duty only for cops to avoid making a mistake, or suffer potential prison time.
If this outcome is what the people want, for a specific profession, shouldn't it be written as a separate, strict liability, crime?
The law is not supposed to be subject to a jury's whims in both directions. Juries can legitimately nullify a law and vote to acquit in a case of obvious guilt under the law and the facts. Juries can't, or aren't supposed to even though they do sometimes, creatively reinterpret the law to find someone guilty when the state puts on no evidence of an element—in this case, awareness of risk required for criminal recklessness.
Tom Servo said:
As for Potter's case, I don't see it fitting the criteria for first-degree manslaughter at all.
According to the NYT, the manslaughter 1 argument is via 609.20 (2), requiring a predicate misdemeanor, namely reckless handling of a firearm. The trouble is, she wasn't conscious of having a firearm in her hand at the time, which is a required element of recklessness, both reckless handling of a firearm required for manslaughter 1, and recklessness causing death required for manslaughter 2.
The prosecution didn't have any evidence I saw that use of a taser was unreasonable. Cops are privileged to use force to effect arrests. The prosecution couldn't cite a policy forbidding Taser use in that situation. The best they could do was a witness who said he didn't think it was "appropriate" use. That means nothing, legally. That witness was a lawyer; if he'd meant unreasonable, he'd have said unreasonable. The state also tried to argue that it was reckless because it could have interfered with driving, despite the car not being in gear at the time. That makes no sense, because if Daunte could have gotten the car into drive and hit the gas while being tased, the taser wouldn't have been working very well and wouldn't have been severely interfering with driving ability. Regardless, the wires are 25ft and break or detach beyond that.
