Manslaughter

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Michael McMahon
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Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

Fairness and legal precedents are of utmost importance. Sentencing must be consistent for people convicted for similar crimes in order to be as democratic as possible. There’s too much deviation. Manslaughter unnecessarily complicates matters. It’s already difficult to harmonise sentencing for other crimes like assault so it’d be doubly difficult to be consistent in having two independent killing offences. The word of manslaughter instead of murder symbolically dehumanises victims as if you were killed for dinner! Some people may indeed be “out of character” when they commit a crime (they must of got the wrong script: we were all doing the Wizard of Oz while they learned Macbeth!). But in truth we can say the same about any criminal who changes and chooses to be repentant after a crime. So there’s no need for this distinction between murder and manslaughter (much like the nonexistence of the forced mating, coerced charity or kid borrowing crimes!).

The mitigating factors for murder are insufficient to justify there being two separate classes of the crime of killing a person. I acknowledge that there can sometimes be genuine accidents that causes deaths and cases of proportional self-defence. But there are other cases that don’t warrant this exemption. Another name for excessive self-defence is vigilantism. Once a person is seriously injured in an altercation they don't pose much of a threat due to their reduced mobility. There are 360 degrees around and above to fire a warning shot so if it just so happen to fatally hit the suspect then it's rather reckless. Even implementing a final blow to an incapacitated victim would be like justifying nonconsensual euthanasia. Firing at a fleeing suspect is dubious unless the perpetrator was at imminent risk of carrying out murder or serious assault. Vigilantes can be truly reckless and ungrateful by making the original victims feel guilty after getting revenge on their behalf without their permission. A vigilante often isn't even half-forgiving in their retribution by being under-proportional and slightly cautious. After all a slap in the face could technically be a form of mild vigilantism.

A synonym for negligence can be the intentional endangering of other society members in general; even when they didn’t intend to personally risk that victim individually. It sometimes feels as if death is mysterious and transcendent where there's nothing the legal system can really do to improve the situation. However if a victim of an assault or an accident was left in a lifelong coma instead of dying at the scene, would we feel more of a need to jail the perpetrator? In other words are we subconsciously making assumptions that a pleasant afterlife might be a mitigating factor? Anyway I agree with the insanity defence as a mitigating factor but not always as an exoneration. A psychotic experience will indeed confuse a person’s understanding of logic. But one would still need a small degree of understanding about causality and slyness just to carry out a complex crime. Anxiety is usually directed at one’s self. "Murderer-itus" isn't a medical diagnosis! The insanity defence is often used in violent crimes even though the slippery slope is fairly blatant to see if it were used in sexual crimes. A challenge with the insanity defence is that mental illnesses can contain the opposite delusions such that an altercation between different patients could become uncontrollable. For example autism contrasts with psychosis such that any physical fight between these patients could destabilise them. Perpetrating a crime would further destabilise a psychotic person if they were an ethical person at base. This means that any anxiety and disorientation of a psychotic patient following the perpetration of a crime would almost be punishment in and of itself. By contrast a sudden return back to normality following a crime might imply that the temporary psychosis occurred in an immoral person.

I understand that some people charged with manslaughter have very serious and legitimate grievances against the victim. But society would descend into a free-for-all if everyone were to decide to act violently against people who they perceive to have mistreated them. That would send the wrong message. Being vengeful against other admittedly vengeful people is to be yourself part of the problem. It’s about dissuading people from escalating a volatile situation rather than trying to somehow accommodate such pent-up emotions when determining a court sentence. I actually had in the back of my mind the notion of unprovoked fights and assaults when I wrote the first post in the thread. But I came across comments that disagreed strongly with my take on manslaughter for the opposite reason. They argued for the sake of the vigilante types of cases. This demonstrates the inherent risk of the manslaughter defence being exploited and abused in all non-accidental sorts of crimes. In my view it’s a lawless downward spiral. People might find rare borderline or tricky cases but overall this defence does far more harm than good. Unless you go by the name Romulus or Remus, no one was raised in the woods by wolves. Even when we make ethical arguments in favour of the manslaughter defence there is then the very real problem of taxation. So the victims of crimes are also taxpayers as are the perpetrators. So the state is obliged to defend people not only for moral reasons but also for commercial reasons if we'd to be cynical about it. It's unlikely any victim would rebel by tax avoidance but the problem is really when swathes of voters look for more extreme political parties or become anti-social in other ways. The sadness of evil is when true victims decide to scapegoat innocent people which is risks a never-ending cycle.

The flip side of manslaughter is that a conviction of plain murder simply results in a life sentence. So in being charitable to one section we ironically risk being uncharitable to those who are repentant in premeditated cases. I think either increasing the manslaughter sentence sometimes or decreasing the jail-time for murder would lead to more overall consistency. I don’t think there’s much point having a mandatory life sentence for murder if it results in most people simply being charged with manslaughter instead. I think we’d be better off coming to a rough consensus on a medium sentence length for killing someone rather than always aiming for a life sentence. Perhaps there's an argument that every case is unique and deserving of a wholly separate set of rules but unfortunately such divine oversight is far beyond the capacity of the state. From my partial understanding of Christianity it is claimed that God is all-forgiving and this doesn't mean that mortal beings have to be all-forgiving but merely relatively or generally-forgiving. As they say in the westerns, God can forgive you even if I don't! Christianity was founded in Ancient Rome when the vast majority of people were evil. Then it spread at a time of knights and serfs where people simply accepted abuse in the hope of a better afterlife. It made sense to be forgiving in the medieval era simply because you'd to appeal to evil people to commit to their faith. Having faith was almost like Ronald Reagan's realpolitik agenda where evil groups had to be tolerated to defeat larger evil groups! Moreover early Christianity had little perception of the material world. Perhaps it made little sense to care about vengefulness in the pre-scientific age because people were impoverished. Thus everyone was hopeful of a better afterlife given that earthly life already had too much hardship. Even when they weren't attacked by evil people there would still have been widescale hunger and homelessness. Unless we're living an ascetic lifestyle like the Amish community then it's unrealistic for many technologically indulgent citizens to not care at all about justice in the material world. King Henry VIII may have got away with formal honour killings of his wives in the medieval era but few Christians these days have any appeal to royal pardons. The irony is that in today's societies good people tend to vastly outnumber criminals. As such it seems like we could afford to be a bit stricter. Saying a serial killer isn't as bad as a genocidal serial killer doesn't seem like much of a consolation. Is an angry murderer less worse than a sexual murderer? Although who knows if we started taking the metaphysical system for granted that lots of people would reject faith altogether. There is a philosophical problem of evil that's intractable but the difference with the court system is that they've already been arrested. Should the court "surrender" to criminals who've actually already surrendered to the police? It's not like a mandatory sentence applies to those who weren't caught! The court system is logically unable to atone for the impunity of criminals on the run or historical war crimes. So nor should we expect the courts to defeat spiritual evil permanently as it'll always strike again in different forms. For example when we think of deterring misogyny the courts cannot simply impose mandatory life sentences on rapists. The same criminals would simply alter their aggression pre-emptively through assault instead. Most people would understand just how silly it'd be if raping a woman landed you with two years in prison while punching a woman would put you away for two months! Evil is like a drug and if the courts specially went all out punishing cocaine users then they'd just use another drug. That is to say we can't proportionately increase the sentence of every single crime category owing to limited jail space and ethical concerns. Perhaps women should get lighter sentences than men not because they're less self-aware but simply for society to over-compensate for masculine indulgences! They'll redeem themselves in other ways! Communism is deemed idealistic but so are anarchistic versions of capitalistic libertarianism. Likewise just because mandatory sentencing is too idealistic the same can also be said of unregulated individualistic sentencing. Erratic high sentences for rape might even deter rape victims from reporting it to the police if the victims don't hate the perpetrator to that extent. Objectively speaking the only thing more culpable for vigilantism than criminality is contempt of court. Truth be told there's much overlap between a criminal and a vigilante mindset when evil people find it much harder to forgive others than good people. Hence being lenient to one side of criminality or vigilantism will eventually end up being lenient to another side. This is proved ad absurdism in the Philippines war on drugs. Drug gangs want to kill rival drug gangs. A gang feud is really just a form of mutual vigilantism without any self-righteousness. As such these gangs don't seem to care when vigilantism has merely fuelled inter-gang warfare. Murder of poor people caught in the crossfire is now almost a more frequent crime than drug trafficking in the Philippines.

In summary, it’s not merely the length of the jail sentence but the potential multi-year disparity between murder and manslaughter that I find concerning. In rare instances there might even be a multi-decade difference for loosely similar non-defensive killings(*). We don't have second-class citizens and this applies to both the victims and the criminals. Provocation is a bit like crony capitalism in the sense of friendly and "crony" sentencing. Low sentences can result in apathetic recidivism and high sentences can lead to the criminal being a vengeful recidivist. Thus proportionality is a must! The problem with personalised sentences for the perpetrator is that it could also be personal against the victim. Inconsistent rape sentences is often a sign of amoral rather than immoral sentencing. For example high financial compensation to some victims doesn't scapegoat anyone but it has the effect of concealing all of the under-compensated cases. A wounded soldier mistreated in a makeshift battle hospital would get very little compensation compared to a civilian hospital. An underfunded hospital could almost sue the government for more staff if we took compensation culture to an extreme. Some low sentences or high compensation settlements could be deemed very loving rather than unfair. For example no one could ever hold a grudge against an injured person who gets high compensation from the government. Yet a judiciary in a limited state isn't expected to be loving. The problem with elevating kindness to love is that it's very difficult to love people equally. Much like a romantic relationship love can be fraught with betrayal. There'll always be a few bad sentences no matter how automated the decisions are. Nonetheless we can try to win the war even if we lose a battle with a poor sentence. Too many people give the right wing extra power by having to advocate the advocate the exact opposite left wing policy. Independence where you can just ignore the right wing can be more liberating than rebelliousness. People are free to be violent perfectionists who advocate hatred of the death penalty without having to endorse non-punishment of criminals. To avoid the trap of reverse psychology then just be violent without being a violent extremist! Viewing low recidivism as the only criterion for effective punishment is a flaw when some criminals have already got the violence all out of their system with their first crime despite having endorsed collective criminality. If everyone were allowed a 1 kill allowance then we'd probably have a lot less people rebelling against society as serial killers even if we'd have many more lone murderers. Discipline is about removing negative aspects of a criminal's metaphysical belief system rather than just their emotional mindset and rationality system. An Islamic extremist for example cannot ever be deprogrammed out of Islam in a secular society but a terrorist's interpretation of Islam can still be subject to judicial punishment in addition to the crime itself. The frequent atheism of the left wing means they're prone to ignore the spirituality of a crime rather than just the conservatively religious aspects of a crime. China is left-wing despite how they still have strict or even harsh punishments of criminals simply because they can't rely on a baseline of Christianity in their society to stop a collective descent into criminality. So high prison sentences in China are not of any dislike of egalitarianism or the western left wing but rather out of excessive pragmatism. The reduction of Christian adherents in the west into the future will mean that western left-wingers will have to be more self-reliant in their approach to criminal justice. We need to be proportionate in how evil we are to everyone! For all the criticism of right wingers playing God over the death penalty it's still the case that highly idiosyncratic sentencing is also a form of playing God through state glorification. Thankfully the soul leaves the body at death where we hide the decomposition of a dead body through cremation or burial. Yet if society had to be very physicalist in our perception then a rotting corpse is a deterrent to both the death penalty and unduly lenient murder sentences. Vigilantism and recidivism both have subjective elements to them relative to the fact they've rebelled against a subjective court system. Moreover the victims of vigilantism can give rise to recidivists in such a way that evil counteracts evil and no one should endorse such a system. Ironically a temperamental and unpredictable judge is best suited to sentencing the meta-complexities of recidivists and vigilantes!
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Agent Smith
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Agent Smith »

I humbly beg to differ! I hope doing so doesn't mean I'll havta eat me own words.

Nevertheless, you do have a point! I'm sure the judicial system that has the time and resources will figure it out ... all in good time, eh bruh? Meanwhile ... we :mrgreen: and bear it, oui?
Age
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Age »

Michael McMahon wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 2:50 pm Fairness and legal precedents are of utmost importance. Sentencing must be consistent for people convicted for similar crimes in order to be as democratic as possible. There’s too much deviation. Manslaughter unnecessarily complicates matters. It’s already difficult to harmonise sentencing for other crimes like assault so it’d be doubly difficult to be consistent in having two independent killing offences. The word of manslaughter instead of murder symbolically dehumanises victims as if you were killed for dinner! Some people may indeed be “out of character” when they commit a crime (they must of got the wrong script: we were all doing the Wizard of Oz while they learned Macbeth!). But in truth we can say the same about any criminal who changes and chooses to be repentant after a crime. So there’s no need for this distinction between murder and manslaughter (much like the nonexistence of the forced mating, coerced charity or kid borrowing crimes!).
What does the word 'manslaughter' even mean or refer to, to you, EXACTLY?
Michael McMahon wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 2:50 pm The mitigating factors for murder are insufficient to justify there being two separate classes of the crime of killing a person. I acknowledge that there can sometimes be genuine accidents that causes deaths and cases of proportional self-defence. But there are other cases that don’t warrant this exemption. Another name for excessive self-defence is vigilantism. Once a person is seriously injured in an altercation they don't pose much of a threat due to their reduced mobility. There are 360 degrees around and above to fire a warning shot so if it just so happen to fatally hit the suspect then it's rather reckless. Even implementing a final blow to an incapacitated victim would be like justifying nonconsensual euthanasia. Firing at a fleeing suspect is dubious unless the perpetrator was at imminent risk of carrying out murder or serious assault. Vigilantes can be truly reckless and ungrateful by making the original victims feel guilty after getting revenge on their behalf without their permission. A vigilante often isn't even half-forgiving in their retribution by being under-proportional and slightly cautious. After all a slap in the face could technically be a form of mild vigilantism.

A synonym for negligence can be the intentional endangering of other society members in general; even when they didn’t intend to personally risk that victim individually. It sometimes feels as if death is mysterious and transcendent where there's nothing the legal system can really do to improve the situation. However if a victim of an assault or an accident was left in a lifelong coma instead of dying at the scene, would we feel more of a need to jail the perpetrator? In other words are we subconsciously making assumptions that a pleasant afterlife might be a mitigating factor? Anyway I agree with the insanity defence as a mitigating factor but not always as an exoneration. A psychotic experience will indeed confuse a person’s understanding of logic. But one would still need a small degree of understanding about causality and slyness just to carry out a complex crime. Anxiety is usually directed at one’s self. "Murderer-itus" isn't a medical diagnosis! The insanity defence is often used in violent crimes even though the slippery slope is fairly blatant to see if it were used in sexual crimes. A challenge with the insanity defence is that mental illnesses can contain the opposite delusions such that an altercation between different patients could become uncontrollable. For example autism contrasts with psychosis such that any physical fight between these patients could destabilise them. Perpetrating a crime would further destabilise a psychotic person if they were an ethical person at base. This means that any anxiety and disorientation of a psychotic patient following the perpetration of a crime would almost be punishment in and of itself. By contrast a sudden return back to normality following a crime might imply that the temporary psychosis occurred in an immoral person.

I understand that some people charged with manslaughter have very serious and legitimate grievances against the victim. But society would descend into a free-for-all if everyone were to decide to act violently against people who they perceive to have mistreated them. That would send the wrong message. Being vengeful against other admittedly vengeful people is to be yourself part of the problem. It’s about dissuading people from escalating a volatile situation rather than trying to somehow accommodate such pent-up emotions when determining a court sentence. I actually had in the back of my mind the notion of unprovoked fights and assaults when I wrote the first post in the thread. But I came across comments that disagreed strongly with my take on manslaughter for the opposite reason. They argued for the sake of the vigilante types of cases. This demonstrates the inherent risk of the manslaughter defence being exploited and abused in all non-accidental sorts of crimes. In my view it’s a lawless downward spiral. People might find rare borderline or tricky cases but overall this defence does far more harm than good. Unless you go by the name Romulus or Remus, no one was raised in the woods by wolves. Even when we make ethical arguments in favour of the manslaughter defence there is then the very real problem of taxation. So the victims of crimes are also taxpayers as are the perpetrators. So the state is obliged to defend people not only for moral reasons but also for commercial reasons if we'd to be cynical about it. It's unlikely any victim would rebel by tax avoidance but the problem is really when swathes of voters look for more extreme political parties or become anti-social in other ways. The sadness of evil is when true victims decide to scapegoat innocent people which is risks a never-ending cycle.

The flip side of manslaughter is that a conviction of plain murder simply results in a life sentence. So in being charitable to one section we ironically risk being uncharitable to those who are repentant in premeditated cases. I think either increasing the manslaughter sentence sometimes or decreasing the jail-time for murder would lead to more overall consistency.
But there is NO 'consistency' in crimes, and accidents. In fact EVERY crime is UNIQUE and DIFFERENT, just as EVERY accident is UNIQUE and DIFFERENT.

And, the after-effects are ALL ALSO UNIQUE and DIFFERENT.
Michael McMahon wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 2:50 pm I don’t think there’s much point having a mandatory life sentence for murder if it results in most people simply being charged with manslaughter instead. I think we’d be better off coming to a rough consensus on a medium sentence length for killing someone rather than always aiming for a life sentence. Perhaps there's an argument that every case is unique and deserving of a wholly separate set of rules but unfortunately such divine oversight is far beyond the capacity of the state. From my partial understanding of Christianity it is claimed that God is all-forgiving and this doesn't mean that mortal beings have to be all-forgiving but merely relatively or generally-forgiving. As they say in the westerns, God can forgive you even if I don't! Christianity was founded in Ancient Rome when the vast majority of people were evil. Then it spread at a time of knights and serfs where people simply accepted abuse in the hope of a better afterlife. It made sense to be forgiving in the medieval era simply because you'd to appeal to evil people to commit to their faith. Having faith was almost like Ronald Reagan's realpolitik agenda where evil groups had to be tolerated to defeat larger evil groups! Moreover early Christianity had little perception of the material world. Perhaps it made little sense to care about vengefulness in the pre-scientific age because people were impoverished. Thus everyone was hopeful of a better afterlife given that earthly life already had too much hardship. Even when they weren't attacked by evil people there would still have been widescale hunger and homelessness. Unless we're living an ascetic lifestyle like the Amish community then it's unrealistic for many technologically indulgent citizens to not care at all about justice in the material world. King Henry VIII may have got away with formal honour killings of his wives in the medieval era but few Christians these days have any appeal to royal pardons. The irony is that in today's societies good people tend to vastly outnumber criminals. As such it seems like we could afford to be a bit stricter. Saying a serial killer isn't as bad as a genocidal serial killer doesn't seem like much of a consolation. Is an angry murderer less worse than a sexual murderer? Although who knows if we started taking the metaphysical system for granted that lots of people would reject faith altogether. There is a philosophical problem of evil that's intractable but the difference with the court system is that they've already been arrested. Should the court "surrender" to criminals who've actually already surrendered to the police? It's not like a mandatory sentence applies to those who weren't caught! The court system is logically unable to atone for the impunity of criminals on the run or historical war crimes. So nor should we expect the courts to defeat spiritual evil permanently as it'll always strike again in different forms. For example when we think of deterring misogyny the courts cannot simply impose mandatory life sentences on rapists. The same criminals would simply alter their aggression pre-emptively through assault instead. Most people would understand just how silly it'd be if raping a woman landed you with two years in prison while punching a woman would put you away for two months! Evil is like a drug and if the courts specially went all out punishing cocaine users then they'd just use another drug. That is to say we can't proportionately increase the sentence of every single crime category owing to limited jail space and ethical concerns. Perhaps women should get lighter sentences than men not because they're less self-aware but simply for society to over-compensate for masculine indulgences! They'll redeem themselves in other ways! Communism is deemed idealistic but so are anarchistic versions of capitalistic libertarianism. Likewise just because mandatory sentencing is too idealistic the same can also be said of unregulated individualistic sentencing. Erratic high sentences for rape might even deter rape victims from reporting it to the police if the victims don't hate the perpetrator to that extent. Objectively speaking the only thing more culpable for vigilantism than criminality is contempt of court. Truth be told there's much overlap between a criminal and a vigilante mindset when evil people find it much harder to forgive others than good people. Hence being lenient to one side of criminality or vigilantism will eventually end up being lenient to another side. This is proved ad absurdism in the Philippines war on drugs. Drug gangs want to kill rival drug gangs. A gang feud is really just a form of mutual vigilantism without any self-righteousness. As such these gangs don't seem to care when vigilantism has merely fuelled inter-gang warfare. Murder of poor people caught in the crossfire is now almost a more frequent crime than drug trafficking in the Philippines.

In summary, it’s not merely the length of the jail sentence but the potential multi-year disparity between murder and manslaughter that I find concerning. In rare instances there might even be a multi-decade difference for loosely similar non-defensive killings(*). We don't have second-class citizens and this applies to both the victims and the criminals. Provocation is a bit like crony capitalism in the sense of friendly and "crony" sentencing. Low sentences can result in apathetic recidivism and high sentences can lead to the criminal being a vengeful recidivist. Thus proportionality is a must! The problem with personalised sentences for the perpetrator is that it could also be personal against the victim. Inconsistent rape sentences is often a sign of amoral rather than immoral sentencing. For example high financial compensation to some victims doesn't scapegoat anyone but it has the effect of concealing all of the under-compensated cases. A wounded soldier mistreated in a makeshift battle hospital would get very little compensation compared to a civilian hospital. An underfunded hospital could almost sue the government for more staff if we took compensation culture to an extreme. Some low sentences or high compensation settlements could be deemed very loving rather than unfair. For example no one could ever hold a grudge against an injured person who gets high compensation from the government. Yet a judiciary in a limited state isn't expected to be loving. The problem with elevating kindness to love is that it's very difficult to love people equally. Much like a romantic relationship love can be fraught with betrayal. There'll always be a few bad sentences no matter how automated the decisions are. Nonetheless we can try to win the war even if we lose a battle with a poor sentence. Too many people give the right wing extra power by having to advocate the advocate the exact opposite left wing policy. Independence where you can just ignore the right wing can be more liberating than rebelliousness. People are free to be violent perfectionists who advocate hatred of the death penalty without having to endorse non-punishment of criminals. To avoid the trap of reverse psychology then just be violent without being a violent extremist! Viewing low recidivism as the only criterion for effective punishment is a flaw when some criminals have already got the violence all out of their system with their first crime despite having endorsed collective criminality. If everyone were allowed a 1 kill allowance then we'd probably have a lot less people rebelling against society as serial killers even if we'd have many more lone murderers. Discipline is about removing negative aspects of a criminal's metaphysical belief system rather than just their emotional mindset and rationality system. An Islamic extremist for example cannot ever be deprogrammed out of Islam in a secular society but a terrorist's interpretation of Islam can still be subject to judicial punishment in addition to the crime itself. The frequent atheism of the left wing means they're prone to ignore the spirituality of a crime rather than just the conservatively religious aspects of a crime. China is left-wing despite how they still have strict or even harsh punishments of criminals simply because they can't rely on a baseline of Christianity in their society to stop a collective descent into criminality. So high prison sentences in China are not of any dislike of egalitarianism or the western left wing but rather out of excessive pragmatism. The reduction of Christian adherents in the west into the future will mean that western left-wingers will have to be more self-reliant in their approach to criminal justice. We need to be proportionate in how evil we are to everyone! For all the criticism of right wingers playing God over the death penalty it's still the case that highly idiosyncratic sentencing is also a form of playing God through state glorification. Thankfully the soul leaves the body at death where we hide the decomposition of a dead body through cremation or burial. Yet if society had to be very physicalist in our perception then a rotting corpse is a deterrent to both the death penalty and unduly lenient murder sentences. Vigilantism and recidivism both have subjective elements to them relative to the fact they've rebelled against a subjective court system. Moreover the victims of vigilantism can give rise to recidivists in such a way that evil counteracts evil and no one should endorse such a system. Ironically a temperamental and unpredictable judge is best suited to sentencing the meta-complexities of recidivists and vigilantes!
commonsense
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by commonsense »

Michael, would some, or perhaps all, of your concerns be assuaged if the term, “manslaughter”, were reserved for accidental or unintentional killing while the term “3rd degree murder”, could be used to signify intentional or negligent murder?
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Agent Smith
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Agent Smith »

Apes are just stupid humans? 😁
Impenitent
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Impenitent »

Michael McMahon wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 2:50 pm ...Some people may indeed be “out of character” when they commit a crime (they must of got the wrong script: we were all doing the Wizard of Oz while they learned Macbeth!)...
out of character...

Dorothy commits manslaughter by parking her house on a witch... her punishment? having to dance with a bunch of short people who later exile her...

a bit later, Dorothy commits murder by melting a witch with a bucket of water (although in doing so, she frees an army of flying monkeys to fly back to their jungle paradise to freely feast on bananas...) her punishment? she is sent back to Kansas...

interesting...

-Imp
Michael McMahon
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

commonsense wrote: Thu May 18, 2023 7:09 pm Michael, would some, or perhaps all, of your concerns be assuaged if the term, “manslaughter”, were reserved for accidental or unintentional killing while the term “3rd degree murder”, could be used to signify intentional or negligent murder?
Indeed I can understand the harsher symbolism of 3rd degree murder can be more appropriate in certain cases. When it comes to warfare there is so much violence that a lot of crimes cannot be court-martialled. This is why we hear of collateral damage in wars but not so much in the court system. A mandatory sentence evokes a wartime mindset where anyone can be caught in the crossfire of the criminal court system. An individual judge is theoretically far better than any mandatory sentence but judges might not always reflect the ideals of the society.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

Agent Smith wrote: Thu May 18, 2023 8:41 pm Apes are just stupid humans? 😁
Randomness can be a defence against evil in extreme circumstances. For example the unpredictability of projectile warfare means that a lot of countries won’t risk warfare no matter their physical fitness. Likewise the contradictory sentences of a court system can resemble the random outcomes of gun duels. As such the silver lining of an arbitrary court system is that every defendant is threatened with extreme vengeance by the court even they get released free of charge.
Skepdick
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Skepdick »

Michael McMahon wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 2:50 pm Fairness and legal precedents are of utmost importance. Sentencing must be consistent for people convicted for similar crimes in order to be as democratic as possible. There’s too much deviation. Manslaughter unnecessarily complicates matters. It’s already difficult to harmonise sentencing for other crimes like assault so it’d be doubly difficult to be consistent in having two independent killing offences. The word of manslaughter instead of murder symbolically dehumanises victims as if you were killed for dinner! Some people may indeed be “out of character” when they commit a crime (they must of got the wrong script: we were all doing the Wizard of Oz while they learned Macbeth!). But in truth we can say the same about any criminal who changes and chooses to be repentant after a crime. So there’s no need for this distinction between murder and manslaughter (much like the nonexistence of the forced mating, coerced charity or kid borrowing crimes!).

(...)
This premise is rather silly - it erradicates the fundamental assumption in our legal system: the assumption of free will and intentional action. The distinction between being in control and NOT being on control of the outcome.

It's called murder because you are in control of the outcome. You were in control to choose otherwise.
It's called manslaughter; or an accident because you are not in control of the outcome. You were not in control to choose otherwise.

You didn't murder a pedestrian - if you literally lost control of your vehicle.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

One option for very long bail times is for the suspect to remain in a gated community or to have a bodyguard assigned to monitor them in public.

“Mark Sheehan (26), suffered facial injuries when he and his group got a bus home in the Templeogue area of south Dublin at around 4am on August 18th last year...
He appeared at the Dublin Children’s Court in November. Bail with conditions was set in his bond of €200, and the case was adjourned for 10 weeks...
However, when the case resumed, defence counsel Doireann McDonagh explained that the teen was not present and had left the country.
Judge Paul Kelly issued a bench warrant for his arrest.
When the court initially set bail, it ordered the teen to obey a curfew from midnight to 6am and to sign on twice-weekly at Rathmines Garda station.”
https://www.breakingnews.ie/amp/irelan ... 29830.html
Michael McMahon
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

The ultimate limitation of illegal porn and unprosecuted sexual violence isn’t just the direct harm done to the victims and relatives but also the added propensity for violence in all other crime categories. For example a rapist who got away with impunity is in much greater danger of passing on rage to all of their other victims if the rapist was also a thief. If criminals watch illegal porn all day long then lo and behold they’ll be far more reflexive if they go on to commit non-sexual assaults on others. If society ignored rapes then we’d be back in the stone age where everyone would have to be sexually violent just to defend against all other sexually violent people. Truth be told if people aren’t IT specialists searching the dark web then illegal porn shouldn’t be so easily accessible on the internet. Society bears some responsibility for not having enough dedicated IT security to take down illegal porn sites instead of placing all the blame on those who click on such websites.
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by attofishpi »

Agent Smith wrote: Thu May 18, 2023 8:41 pm Apes are just stupid humans? 😁
Is a human that rapes R_ape?

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Michael McMahon
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

attofishpi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 10:16 am Is a human that rapes R_ape?
A major flaw with misogyny is that if everyone accepted violence to women then not only would women be kinder than men but that they’d also end up being braver and more stoic than men. I often require logical extremes to stop me being evil! The dilemma of any honour culture from southern USA to conservative versions of Islam is that it requires male on male violence to justify men still being more resilient than women even if women are subjugated.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

Skepdick wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 2:24 pm It's called murder because you are in control of the outcome. You were in control to choose otherwise.
It's called manslaughter; or an accident because you are not in control of the outcome. You were not in control to choose otherwise.
I was walking home when a young overweight woman cursed at me indirectly as if she was singing to herself. She wasn’t a physical threat and so I simply ignored her and walked on. Had it been the other way round then I might have appeared far more threatening simply because I’m larger and from a more privileged background. So even if the short woman wasn’t too immoral she was still normalising other people doing the same thing. Similarly I was cycling home from tennis years back when two children on bikes threw pebbles at me from behind. I decided to be more entitled and told them sternly to stop. Thankfully they went away. Yet you can imagine if I did the same to an ethnic minority person then it could appear discriminatory. Harmless people who use curse words habitually make any other act of verbal provocation seem overblown. Curse words are vague in that they can be a metaphor for disgust but don’t make logical sense as a direct statement. Hence sentencing provocation without providing a standardised account will be too difficult. Hate speech and pure hatred isn’t the same where verbal insults doesn’t always equate to verbal abuse. Responding to dehumanising insults with physical threats might seem tolerable but the wartime standard of dehumanisation is very high.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Manslaughter

Post by Michael McMahon »

Age wrote: Sat May 06, 2023 1:39 pm But there is NO 'consistency' in crimes, and accidents. In fact EVERY crime is UNIQUE and DIFFERENT, just as EVERY accident is UNIQUE and DIFFERENT.

And, the after-effects are ALL ALSO UNIQUE and DIFFERENT.
I admit I require objective sentencing because people are envious of my good looks!
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