Submitted by IAmTiborius t3_126gwpf in todayilearned
It makes no sense.
Suppose during a basketball game in high school, I got injured after someone pushed me, which resulted in a problem with my leg or knee, making me walk awkwardly. Twenty-five years later, I tripped and fell face-first on something that killed me, which was caused by my knee problem. Would the person who pushed me during the basketball game be held responsible for my injury and ultimately, my death?
Are you rich, and/or politically important?
It largely depends on the circumstances of the original act. For instance, shooting someone under any circumstance is a very serious crime. Even if wasn't an immediately fatal injury, and it was totally by accident, there are still numerous charges that you would net: assault with a deadly weapon, criminal negligence, and so on. Some states even have laws on the books which allow cases that may not normally be considered murders to be treated as such—for example, the concept of "felony murder," where if you commit a felony that directly results in someone's death, even if you did not intend for it to happen, you could still be charged with murder.
Also, it depends on the circumstances of the death. It wasn't as if Brady had died in an unrelated incident that may have been exacerbated by his condition, he died as a direct result of the condition and the toll it had on its body. A more fitting analogy would be is if someone deliberately pushed you off a high ledge, you broke your spine, and you died 25 years later because of your paralysis.
I like your example, thanks.
No, because the person who pushed you didn't intend to commit murder and the knee injury wasn't the proximate cause of death. The person who tried to assassinate Reagan did have that intent and injuries from the shooting proximately caused Brady's death, so it was a homicide.
Murder charges only require intent to hurt, not intent to kill.
Also, homicide doesn't require any intent at all
That's not entirely accurate. People can be charged with murder when they didn't intend to kill someone under the felony murder rule if the death occurs when they're in the process of committing another felony. In this hypothetical, there's no criminal intent if someone is fouled in a basketball game. Even if the player intended to injure the other player, at most it would likely be a misdemeanor assault, so the felony murder rule wouldn't apply (plus the basketball injury wasn't the proximate cause of the death). Even if the basketball injury did cause the death, if there's insufficient criminal intent to charge the player with murder, then it would be manslaughter and the statute of limitations for manslaughter would have already lapsed by that point.
It would be if your name was put on a bill to end gun violence.
Not even close to the same thing. Brady was one step above a vegetable the rest of his life after being shot. It was a long, slow death and not hard to say the death was ultimately connected to his being shot. Are we really dumbed down to the point people compare being shot and suffering the rest of your life to being pushed in basketball and rolling an ankle?
Also a way to let his family get maximum death benefits
I don't know, but it made me think of a case from torts class.
In 1891, the Wisconsin Supreme Court came to a similar result in Vosburg v. Putney.[10] In that case, a boy kicked another from across the aisle in the classroom. It turned out that the victim had an unknown microbial condition that was irritated, and resulted in him entirely losing the use of his leg. No one could have predicted the level of injury. Nevertheless, the court found that the kicking was unlawful because it violated the "order and decorum of the classroom", and the perpetrator was therefore fully liable for the injury.
here, the death is labeled a homicide, the source being two newspapers that are behind adwalls. but homicide here is not the same as chargeable as homicide, because the death was not within a year and a day. i don't remember why the common law rule adds that extra day.
>Would the person who pushed me during the basketball game be held responsible for my injury and ultimately, my death?
Probably not, since that would be an accident and the player wasn't attempting to commit a crime. (They were committing a foul.)
This is why you're not a lawyer, luckily.
I think in this case it's more of a distinction of the type of death, not assigning blame. OP posted some details that the shooter wasn't charged because at the time of the original shooting he successfully pleaded insanity to all charges, including the homicide death that resulted years later.
Still odd, never heard of something like this before.
I've seen it ruled as homicide as well, when the victim of shaken baby syndrome dies of their injuries after a consider length of time. Sometimes years/decades later.
They died from their injuries caused by the act- it just was really slow at killing them.
Did they push you with the intent to kill you? No. If you trip and fall and break your neck, is your bad knee the primary cause of death? No, accidenfal falling is. You can fall without a bad knee. The bad knee is at most a contributing factor.
Your hypothetical shares none of the key factors here
The difference is the action taken against you. Pushing is not the same thing as shooting at someone with bodyguards. It would all be part of a larger picture of course, but in the scenario of a baseball game, it could very well be argued that the foreseeable consequences for the pusher did not realistically include death, while that could almost never be assumed about a gun. The Baldwin case being a good example of when that argument could be made, as we assume he honestly believed he was holding a sophisticated and professional prop.
Legally, it's a year and a day before you're unable to be charged. So, yeah.
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