Seems fair. It's not because of "tweets" but because of evidence of intentional recklessness that resulted in the death of an innocent.
As a society, we tend to lack accountability when a car is involved. If he, for instance, killed someone by swinging an axe around a playground for fun, there'd be no question about murder charges.
Cars are dangerous, but we humans get numb to the idea that any mishap could be yours and/or several others final moment.
If it were common practice to be swinging an axe around in the classroom for hours straight we'd probably be more lenient to the accidents that would have occurred as well.
This isn't one of those situations. This guy ruined his life by ending another's. Even without the tweets, he'd probably be facing 10+ years in prison.
A related topic -- I wonder how many young drivers realize that, reaction time aside, it takes four times the distance to stop a car at 80 MPH as at 40 MPH. Four times the distance, not twice, as many people think.
The reason? A moving mass has a kinetic energy equal to 1/2 mv^2 -- note the squared velocity term. I think this is something that young drivers should be taught. Older drivers learn this by experience and acquired instinct, but young drivers, especially those who don't learn physics or mathematics in school, may learn it the hard way.
This would make some sense if all vehicles had the same braking force. Though, even then, I think you'd want a kinetic energy limit. (A stopping distance limit would probably be the most direct.)
Momentum (or kinetic energy) as modified by human reaction times, which in turn are a function of the road design and other local conditions. That implies signs which are not only tailored to their location, but can automatically adjust based on weather and human activity patterns. Streetlights come the closest to approximating this, but I'm not aware of streetlights that react to weather.
(Road design is a fascinating field; the intersection of physics, materials science, automobile engineering, and human psychology. It's possible to design a road to allow the average person to drive a modern midsize sedan in relative safety given good weather conditions, but you have to make the road a closed system (controlled access) and become zealous about maintaining it and the cars that use it. The Autobahn, in other words.)
This is totally fair, and a solid observation. I think it's a little remiss to square blame on the shoulders of the young though. A lot of accidents are caused by poor reactions, tiredness and distraction. Something the older generations can be equally guilty of. (I say this as a person who could be in no way considered 'young'.)
The difference is that he chose to be needlessly reckless. Had the accident happened while he was driving the speed limit, he wouldn't be facing murder charges
> I think it's a little remiss to square blame on the shoulders of the young though. A lot of accidents are caused by poor reactions, tiredness and distraction.
Fair enough, but don't forget inexperience, an important factor, one that disproportionately affects young drivers.
It's best to think of a mesa of driving skill: The slope on the left side is where experience is gained, the plateau is someone's prime driving decades (hopefully!), and the slope on the right side is when inevitable physical decay of the brain and everything else takes its toll.
The trick is to make the ramp-up as uneventful as possible and to arrest the decline before it's serious. Sadly, adults who've driven for decades are commonly loathe to ever give it up, and for good reason in our car-centric society.
Also, I think the whole concept of field drug testing is misguided because it's using a bad proxy when a direct test, in the form of field reaction time testing, wouldn't be any harder to accomplish. Reaction time testing doesn't test judgment skills, but neither does testing for BAC, necessarily, and focusing on BAC ignores fatigue, which is a known killer. (And we allow stupid people to drive anyway.)
This is taught around day one of the mandatory theory course kids take before being allowed to even try for their licenses here. And it's on the theory tests that also need to be passed.
I seem to remember that a minimum interval of two seconds was the rule for following another vehicle, but the whole car lengths thing always threw me...
Are we talking Lincoln Continentals, or Volkswagon Beetles?
> I seem to remember that a minimum interval of two seconds was the rule for following another vehicle ...
That's a reasonable rule of thumb, but it doesn't work in all cases -- it makes too many assumptions. It only takes driver reaction time into account, and it serves to partly explain why accidents in fog tend to involve many cars and high levels of injury and destruction.
The reason? The two second rule assumes the car in front of you has the same stopping distance characteristics as your car, once the brakes are applied. But if the car in front of yours abruptly stops by hitting an immovable object (instead of skidding to a stop) and you are two seconds behind him, you will surely collide with him also, and the car behind you will collide with you, ad infinitum. People who drive at normal speeds in fog apparently don't realize this.
So a new proposed rule -- if you can't see the car in front of the car in front of you, pull over and catch up on your reading. I doubt this rule will take hold.
We are actually taught stopping distances (inc. reaction times) in the UK, for our theory tests.
I typically find that when I'm being tail-gated it's someone in their mid-life, I don't know if there is a problem with young people knowing about stopping distances.
I do know there is a problem with young people like me driving recklessly and causing crashes, I just think that there's a possibility that that comes from, well, recklessness. They know the facts and choose to ignore them.
> We are actually taught stopping distances (inc. reaction times) in the UK, for our theory tests.
That's admirable, but I think it would be better to know why those distances are true, i.e. the velocity-squared rule. The idea is very simple, certainly simpler than memorizing a bunch of distances or even noticing the overall relationship between speed and distance.
> They know the facts and choose to ignore them.
There's a substantial literature about how the teenage brain is wired differently than the brains of those both older and younger. Giving them a car only exacerbates the problem. The irony is that a 10-year-old, and a 25-year-old, would both be likely safer drivers than a 15-year-old.
It would be interesting to see a graph of driver safety versus age -- ascending safety as age progresses from zero to about 12 (hypothetically, of course), then a really big dip in safety centered on 16, then another ascent, a long level spell between 25 and 60, then a tailing off after age 60, finally a terrible and irreversible decline after about 75.
We are usually taught about the velocity squared rule! I think I recall one of the problems on my theory test being based on it. It'd be hard to memorise stopping distances, although I think we do have to memorise approximate reaction time distances.
> We are usually taught about the velocity squared rule!
To me this is a sobering reminder of how much of real life is denied to American students in order to honor intellectual mediocrity, which is so widespread here that it might as well be a secular religion.
I wonder how many drivers realise that a modern high end car with good brakes will stop in a fraction of the time of a 20 year old Escort with barely legal tyres?
I wonder how many drivers realise that reaction times are not equal between drivers, and that attempting to include it within any estimations is futile because whilst I fiddle with my radio, or check my exquisitely coiffed hair in the rear view mirror, my reaction time is roughly that of my 95 year old grandmother.
I could go on?
The only truly accurate speed limit is one that which accounts for everything. Visibility, road conditions, brakes, tyres, alertness, time of day, type of road, skill of driver and probably 15 other things I haven't thought of in this little rant. Once this is accepted one can appreciate the most fundamental problem with speed limits - just because it says 60 on the sign doesn't mean that is a safe speed at which to drive.
Fixed speed limits are the only mechanic we have to try and keep people safe. A simple momentum equation tells 5% of the story.
> I wonder how many drivers realise that a modern high end car with good brakes will stop in a fraction of the time of a 20 year old Escort with barely legal tyres?
Guess what? That is false. Car braking doesn't work the way you seem to think. Assuming the brakes take hold and the wheels aren't turning, a small, light car with four skinny tires, and a very large truck with 18 large tires, stop in the same distance.
When police investigate an accident, they have one braking-distance list that assumes level, dry pavement, but doesn't care about vehicle weight, tire size, number of tires, or anything else -- all those factors cancel out.
Wet pavement, pavement not level, yes, those are factors. Car size and weight, wheel count and tire area, not relevant.
Murder is intentional killing, this guy appears to have only said "I'm going to drive really fast" not "I'm going to run over that particular woman".
There is a difference between shooting your neighbour because you disagree over loud music and standing in your garden and firing up to celebrate the superbowl win and the bullet comes down killing your neighbour. You should do time for both yes, but they are different crimes.
Quote: "The precise definition of murder varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Under the Common Law, or law made by courts, murder was the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. The term malice aforethought did not necessarily mean that the killer planned or premeditated on the killing, or that he or she felt malice toward the victim. Generally, malice aforethought referred to a level of intent or recklessness that separated murder from other killings and warranted stiffer punishment."
I draw your attention to "to a level of intent or recklessness", evidence for which which the defendant provided to the prosecution by boasting about his speeding behavior online.
Would a reasonable person have foreseen the possibility that driving 80mph down a residential street might kill someone? Yes. It's easy to kill someone with a car even when driving the speed limit. Far easier when treating a residential street like a dragway.
Did the person consciously choose to drive 80? Yes. The gas pedal didn't get stuck. They didn't have a micro-stroke or go into diabetic shock. We know that they consciously chose to drive unsafely because they bragged about it.
The mens rea requirement for common law murder could be satisfied by reckless indifference to risk to human life (among other things) as well as intent to kill; this is reflected in most murder statutes in US jurisdictions.
No, but only because in most jurisdictions, attempted murder requires the specific intent to kill, while as others have mentioned, murder requires malice (which is not the same).
In general, attempt requires specific intent, even if the attempted crime does not. Murder is one of the few "common law crimes" where this matters, because most of them are already specific intent crimes anyway.
You think it's ridiculous that it's considered reckless to drive twice the speed limit?
If he was driving 40mph, it would be an accident. At 80mph, it's murder. He made the premeditated decision to kill when he threw everything he knew about driving safely out the window and put the pedal to the metal. It's that simple.
Actions have consequences. 18 year-olds can understand that.
This wasn't a freeway where he was going 80 in a 75 zone. It was a normal road with intersections and many other road users going the speed limit or below. It's simply idiotic to drive 80 there, and it's very easy to accidentally kill someone when you're going that fast. (You have no time to react.)
Driver's Ed is 6 months of you being told this every single day. He knew it was dangerous. He did it anyway. He killed someone. That's murder.
(Personally, I think 40mph is way too high of a speed limit for roads like this. 20mph would be a much better. Car/pedestrian collisions are much more survivable at that speed, and cyclists can move in and out of traffic freely. But 80mph is just fucking insane.)
He's not saying that actions don't have consequences. He isn't saying that speeding wasn't idiotic. He isn't saying that he was never provided with the opportunity to know better.
If you acknowledge that actions have consequences, it follows that if you commit an action which has a high chance of causing a certain outcome (in this case, death), you are responsible for the outcome. In this case, I would say that the responsibility which this teenager has can only be called "murder".
> He was only 18 years old and he was speeding. Murder is a bit of a stretch.
The reason it became murder is because he was found to be boasting about his speeding behavior online, i.e. it wasn't episodic or unintended. He meant to go fast, he planned to go fast, and an 18-year-old is an adult with adult responsibilities -- whether or not he is ready for them.
Knowingly engaging in behavior that risky — driving faster than any posted speed limit in the entire United States of America on residential streets is egregiously risky — and thereby causing someone's death is textbook murder.
I think it's ridiculous that he gets charged with murder and other people who commit similar offences, which by nothing more than luck happen not to kill people, don't. If intent's what matters then you've got to be consistent in that regard. Otherwise it's not justice, it's just doing someone because they were unlucky.
-shrug-
Not that I'd particularly mind if that was resolved in favour of providing reasonably long prison sentences to people who commit truly awful driving offences. But either way.
> I think it's ridiculous that he gets charged with murder and other people who commit similar offences, which by nothing more than luck happen not to kill people, don't.
I, on the other hand, don't think its ridiculous that homicide is, in fact, an element of the offense of murder.
> If intent's what matters then you've got to be consistent in that regard.
Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
> I, on the other hand, don't think its ridiculous that homicide is, in fact, an element of the offense of murder.
> Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
I suspect we might just have an irreconcilable difference of framework in that respect:
I view the purpose of law to be to minimise the maximise the public good while causing the minimum restriction of freedoms. That being inherently a balancing act, freedom/security, the exact value of which is responsible for a lot of the problems with the actual application of law.
In that framework whether someone's acts resulted in death is dramatically less important than whether they were likely to, and whether the person who did it is likely to do so again unless restrained. (That their acts actually did lead to the death is evidence in favour of that class of act being more likely to lead to deaths than it would be without that bit of evidence, so in that sense it matters.)
Beyond that, whether someone dies or not, the drink driver and the speeder who didn't kill anyone but committed equally dangerous offences - they're all guilty of murder in the sense that matters to me. To borrow the way of phrasing it from the Christians: They've all already killed people in their hearts. It's just luck that no-one's dead for them, and luck's not a property of people, it's a property of limited knowledge; you can't rely on it.
In so far as we have knowledge, under such a system, if you lock the guy who actually killed people up, the rest should be locked up too.
In what way? The article doesn't specify the details of either the Tweets or the driving record that justified the decision to charge it as murder, so are you arguing:
1. It is per se ridiculous to consider driving at 40mph above (or double) the speed limit as an act involving reckless indifference to human life, regardless of the evidence supporting that, or
2. Evidence in the form of driving records and pre-offense statements by the driver could never suffice to support the consideration of such driving as involving reckless indifference to human life, or
3. That you have additional information about the specifics that is not in the article, and that information leads you to to conclusion that in this specific case, reckless indifference in unsupportable, or
4. It is per se ridiculous to consider reckless indifference sufficient mental state for murder, or
5. Something else.
Simply asserting that it is ridiculous is not an argument, and its the kind of contention that really needs an argument.
Although I agree with the general sentiment, I think I have to disagree with the sentence, "There really is no excuse for speeding."
In particular, speeding is a norm in many places in the United States. If you are not going five to ten miles above the speed limit, people are likely to be actively passing you or driving too close behind you. I suspect it's safer to go five miles above the speed limit than have people constantly passing you because you're going slower than everyone else. (That said... I do wish speed limits were limits, and everyone followed them perfectly.)
I know you are joking, but I do think there is a certain argument to be made that should it be proven that the reason the crash fatality happened was due to speeding, then I don't see why somebody should not be done for a form of murder.
> I'm skipping felony murder for the sake of this post
You aren't really. You refer to malice. The four forms of malice in common law murder are:
1. Intent to kill,
2. Intent to cause grievous bodily harm,
3. Acting with reckless indifference to human life,
4. Commission of a felony
I did though, because there are other things, like it has to be a dangerous felony, or a normal felony committed in a dangerous way, and it has to be during the commission of the felony, and ....
You are right that it is malice, but i didn't explain that part.
If they are evidence of intent, yes, they can and should be evidence in judgement.
This particular example would be absolutely no different if he had written down "I really liked speeding today!" repeatedly on pieces of paper and put them on his fridge or whatever else would show intent.
But speeding != intent to commit vehicular manslaughter. "I really liked speeding today" could mean a day at the drag strip. Admittedly far-fetched but not implausible.
Hence, unless you can establish beyond reasonable doubt that his tweets signaled his intent to hurt/maim/kill, it is hard to see how this should be allowed.
Different example: you are having a bad day today and someone overhears you muttering "I'm gonna knock someone out". Your coworker shows up shortly after sporting a black eye from when he slipped and fell earlier. Is it reasonable to assume you beat the crap out of him then?
Doing 80 in a 40 and then bragging about it isn't evidence of intent to kill.
It is, however, evidence of a state of mind that comprehends the speed limit and not only disregards it entirely, but does so deliberately.
The law calls that (among other things) "depraved indifference".
Similarly: imagine you got drunk at a friends apartment, picked up a rifle, and fired several rounds through the floor and into the apartment before (this happened with a friend of mine, now deceased). Imagine you killed someone. You clearly didn't intend to, but no reasonable person could fail to grasp the implication of firing a gun blindly into someone else's apartment. You were recklessly indifferent to the lives of the tenants below you, and have committed second-degree murder.
Driving 80 in a 40mph residential zone is no different from firing a gun blindly through the floor of a top-floor apartment. When my late friend did that, I'm sure he had no comprehension that he might have killed someone. Thankfully, he didn't.
> But speeding != intent to commit vehicular manslaughter. "
It is impossible to have intent to commit vehicular manslaughter.
And he isn't being charged with a murder of an intent-to-kill type, he is being charged with murder of the type known as "depraved indifference", or, in the specific language of the California Penal Code, where malice is implied by "an abandoned and malignant heart". (Penal Code Sec. 188)
> Hence, unless you can establish beyond reasonable doubt that his tweets signaled his intent to hurt/maim/kill, it is hard to see how this should be allowed.
First, intent to hurt/maim/kill isn't an element of the crime he is being charged with, so it doesn't need to be proved at all; second, the tweets are not the only evidence being offered of the actual mental state relevant to the crime, so the tweets don't need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt by themselves; and third, whether the evidence proves a crime beyond a reasonable doubt is what we have juries for, we don't evaluate whether the evidence proves a crime beyond a reasonable doubt before deciding whether to allow a prosecution to proceed.
Yes, I should not have used the word intent, i was writing fast because I was on my way out.
As others have said, intent is not an element that needs to be proved here, but the tweets (and "i really like speeding" on post-it notes on your fridge) would be direct evidence of reckless indifference.
Vehicular manslaughter is not an intentional crime (it's a negligent one in some states, and a reckless/grossly negligent one in others), so it's not possible to have intent to commit it.
(This also means attempted vehicular manslaughter is not a possible crime in most states)
It isn't a slippery slope, because presenting statements and actions (note that it wasn't just the tweets, but driving record as well) that show intent has been routine evidence of mental state for as long as mental state has been an element of crimes.
If it was a slippery slope, we'd have slid the whole way down it long ago.
Thank god this kid will be spending many years behind bars. How else would he ever realize the mistake he's made? Without charging him with murder, he'd surely continue driving recklessly after gaining a taste for blood.
I kind of have to agree with you. A short stint in prison, pay financial compensation to the victim's family and a 10 year ban on driving (followed perhaps by a 5 year probation period where any speeding violation would lead to losing his license) would seem a more reasonable punishment.
I still think he should be charged with murder though.
As a society, we tend to lack accountability when a car is involved. If he, for instance, killed someone by swinging an axe around a playground for fun, there'd be no question about murder charges.