Yesterday I posted a friendly correction to a post at the excellent (and Elite Eleven) blog Crossed Pond regarding a criminal prosecution in the news:
You might be confusing “motive” with “intent.” The DA is entirely correct: “motive” is not an element of a crime and need not be demonstrated either to a grand jury for indictment or to a petit jury for conviction.
The distinction essentially is: “intent” can mean “intent to perform the act resulting in the crime” and not just “intent to commit the crime” or “intent to harm.” The specific definition of “intent” depends of course on the specific crime in question.
The technical definition of “intent” also plays a vital role in tort law (excluding of course negligence and strict liability torts). All that is required is “intent to perform the act that harmed” and not “intent to harm.” A subtle but important distinction.
Another friendly comment I posted yesterday, this time at another Elite Eleven blog, Catallarchy, regarding whether a drug dealer who sold an addict enough narcotics to die from an overdose could be charged with murder:
[A Minnesota statute that reads:]
Whoever, without intent to cause death, proximately causes the death of a human being by, directly or indirectly, unlawfully selling, giving away, bartering, delivering, exchanging, distributing, or administering a controlled substance classified in schedule I or II, is guilty of murder in the third degree[.]
is just a variation of felony-murder. A prosecutor would, incidentally, have a hard time getting past the “proximate causation” element.
Armed with these two snippets, how far should liability, either criminal or tortious, extend to this upstanding citizen?
A 27-year-old Avondale [Arizona] man has been arrested on suspicion of causing a massive power outage last summer in Goodyear’s Estrella community.
The outage knocked out power to nearly 4,000 homes for 19 hours June 18, 2007, when Goodyear’s high reached 115 degrees.
…
According to police, officers arrested the suspect on a tip from the public. He reportedly told investigators he cut down the pole because he enjoyed the sparks it made.
If someone died from the heat after the suspect cut the power, would that be murder? A wrongful death lawsuit? Could a restaurant that saw its food supplies spoil sue for loss of business? If the blackout caused looting and vandalism, would the suspect be liable for it? Discuss.
I love this stuff…
(Via Fark, where commenters insist that the, um, motive of the accused was not to see sparks but to steal the copper wire.)
1 response so far ↓
Link dolphin // Jul 17, 2008 at 12:48 pm
If someone died from the heat after the suspect cut the power, would that be murder?
I don't know enough law to back it up, but my opinion on what SHOULD be is, no, not murder. If an illegal action directly causes a death (ie. he cut down the pole and it fell on someone), I can (maybe) see a murder charge. But when you start stringing out "indirect" causes, I think you're entering into dangerous territory. If he cut down the pole and it caused the power to go out, which caused some restaurants food to go bad (without them noticing) and they served it to a customer, who then got food poisoning and died, is the original pole cutter guilt of murder?