Originally posted by: Dean
It is a Moot point really. He took part in an armed robbery and basically attempted murder. Either way he will get life.
I have no sympathy for anyone who commits a crime like that. He took part in ruining many lives, let his get ruined also.
The thing is that these cases set precedents. For sure he should recieve just punishment for his crime, but it seems important to me that the law be fair and reasonable. The attitude of using "anything you can" to get a harsher penalty seems dangerous to me, and renders the legal system vulnerable to future abuses.
In short, he should probably get life for taking part in an armed robbery, and assaulting and crippling the son. But I don't think they should tack on that bizarre murder charge, since it doesn't make any sense.
Here's an example of the reasoning I fear:
Originally posted by: Captante
If the assholes hadn't broken into the guys house they would all most likely still be alive so the one person responsible for the two deaths is being charged.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
The reason the two thieves are dead is that the homeowner shot them. The
homeowner was responsible for their deaths, but he was acting in accordance with the law, and therefore shouldn't face any penalties. The two thieves (responsible for the burglary and the assault) have received their punishment. If there had been no other thieves, that would be the end of the story. No one would try to charge the manufacturer of the gun, the parents of the thieves, or the person who originally got them into weed, even though the thieves would "most likely still be alive" if any of those factors were different.
So if there are two thieves, no charges are filed. Yet add on one more thief, and in addition to the punishment for burglary and assault (which the dead ones have already been "punished" for), we're going to tack on a murder charge and claim that he was directly responsible for causing the other two to commit the crime and therefore be killed? How do we know that it wasn't one of the dead ones who was gung-ho about the whole idea and convinced the other ones to join in?
What if there were four thieves? Would both of them get charged with murder? Were they both equally and fully "responsible" for the deaths of the other two? How far can we spread around a single murder charge? What if there were 10?
If the surviving thief had been brainwashing the other two, or was demonstrably the ringleader, maybe there would be a case for sticking him with their deaths. Absent any proof, we should only charge him with the crimes we know he committed, and give him the appropriate punishment.