Insane

If someone dies during a burglary here, those with them are charged for murder, no matter how they died. It's a stupid fucking law.

I don't know if I would use such hyperbole -- age of criminal responsibility could well be justified in starting before then. 15 at time of events probably being reasonable, or at least something I would like a relevant psychology type to affirm.
I can equally see some aspects of participation in, or enabling through conscious action or serious incompetence, a crime causing additional aggravation (same line of logic as attempted ? is often still bad stuff and worth punishing).

This though I would agree is pretty egregious. Had he pointed at his mate when it all went down and falsely said he has a gun then I can see him getting problems as a result. Going by the article there, and that appears to include a useful quote from the judge that would not imply anything else, this is not that or the thing from the earlier lines.

Do we have any description of the pursuit such that it ended in shooting? Going back to the first line "of a murder that was actually committed by a police officer" might be inaccurate -- if the shooting was justifiable then it is not murder by definition.

65 years? In what world is it justified to give a 15 year old kid a prison term stretching into his 80s? A virtual death sentence.

That's a very long sentence - even some of the most heinous crimes don't receive that much time.

if you think that 65 years is to long, then what do you say about that poor guy who lost his life? he has a family and a dream too, all his things he made so far got suddenly taken away because some afro asses shot him.

Usa need to bring back death sentence, for all premeditated murders.

From what I see, he is now 18 and did not go to the plea deal that would have given him 25 years. There is no info to what happened during the shooting. If there is I do not see it.

I do agree that these laws are sometimes screwed up, but he was an accomplice to the crime. Regardless of what went down they all deserve jail time. A crime is a crime. Sad to hear the other kid had to lose his life though.

Again I have no idea what went down. Some cops just feel its justified to shoot whenever, and other times the news plays it off as the cop just shot without any warning by cutting clips of the recording to piss people off.

Personally, I would love to leave the US. The second I get that chance, I'm out of here. It is getting out of hand.

@Biff627 to where? to ur canadian cousins'?

@leon315 did you even read the article? The kid didn't kill anyone.

@WeedZ ofc i read, anyway that 18yop guy still took part of that crime, and shall be sentenced.

You think 65 years is fair for breaking and entering?

from what i see How states prison system works, they will probably release this afro for good behavior after 20 year of prison, on vigilanted semi-liberty (dunno if they are correct definitions about this).

correct me if i made a lexical mistake.

@FAST6191 I'd like to know what the kid's history was - if he had been through the juvenile justice system a few times already for various crimes I can see why he should have responsibility for this one, as he would have had a chance already to turn things around. But if it is his first crime, he was probably just falling in with the role models around the neighbourhood and doing what he was told, because he didn't know any better. If that's the case then locking him up is just horrible (he would have plenty of time to become a responsible contributing member of society if given a chance).

So they decided that the guy who actually shot him didn't do anything wrong and that makes it okay to charge someone else for his actions instead? How does that make any sense.
Sure the guy isn't innocent, but charging him for a murder he did not commit and had no plans to commit is just ridiculous.
Like FAST said this is not murder. Even the court admitted as much. So then how can they charge him for murder when it was already decided that it wasn't?

The Real Jdbye said:

So they decided that the guy who actually shot him didn't do anything wrong and that makes it okay to charge someone else for his actions instead? How does that make any sense.

Click to expand...

A simple example of that would be if say the guy charged here had knowingly and falsely indicated to the police officer that shot the other guy that said other guy was a threat. If the police officer then shot the guy and could demonstrate that they met the criteria for such things (most rulings on the matter tend to start with the premise of "things as they appeared at the time") then the police officer would be said to have done no wrong.
Said first person would be guilty of something by virtue of making said false statement that ended with a death.
Or if you prefer then you have crimes like incitement -- if I stand on my soap box and shout for my associates to beat up all people with blue eyes then even if I never throw a punch I am still held as responsible at some level and thus can be charged with something.

I don't think this case from the evidence thus far presented is a good example of an incitement/accomplice/enabling crime, indeed look up the legal principle of mens rea, but the legal basis for charging someone in situations not too different to this is sound and well tested just about everywhere.

Quantumcat said:

@FAST6191 I'd like to know what the kid's history was - if he had been through the juvenile justice system a few times already for various crimes I can see why he should have responsibility for this one, as he would have had a chance already to turn things around. But if it is his first crime, he was probably just falling in with the role models around the neighbourhood and doing what he was told, because he didn't know any better. If that's the case then locking him up is just horrible (he would have plenty of time to become a responsible contributing member of society if given a chance).

Click to expand...

While that may have an impact on the sentencing given for the burglary I can't get to the point where the average 15 year old is not capable of judging their actions in a case like this, not even close. I would probably go so far as to say I don't even need a mandatory psychological evaluation for their competence.
https://www.crin.org/en/home/ages has most places being somewhat lower, and even the UN and their rights of the child does not say a lot
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/docs/55/a5541.pdf (PDF link)
First crime or fifth crime does not make a lot of odds from where I sit.

So according to the article.

The 15 yr old was involved in a robbery with his friends, tried to escape, a shoot out happened which means 1 or a few of his friends shoot back at the cop, his friend killed, and the 15 yr old is being held responsible for the death of his friend under the Accomplice Liability Law, while the other 2 are waiting for their trial.

It wasn't murder by the cop since it was justified. Murder is unlawful killing. But since the cop had reason to shoot since they were escaping and shooting back it wasn't unlawful. So it was a killing rather than a murder.

So whether or not the Liability Law is stupid i'll just sit back and hear others opinions on this.

My take on it:

- Kid does a stupid kid thing (burglarly) together with his 4 friends.
- Neighbors notice, call cops
- Somehow they get in a shootout (and noooo America doesn't have a gun problem, what are you talking about, but I'm not getting into that)
- One of the kid friends dies during the shootout, shot by one of the cops.

So far so good? Right? We're all on the same page here?

Okay lets get a move on then.

- Cops arrest the three remaining kids.
- Cops don't just charge the kids with burglarly, but also charge them with murder of their now dead friend.

Okay so... let's me lay this out.

The question at core here is: Who do you convict of murder/charge with murder?

I'd say there are two potential cases here:

- The person that fired the weapon, did the murder, did the harmful
- The person that ordered the weapon to be fired, or anyone that indirectly ordered the death of the person.

The people they decided to charge with the murder are neither of these two cases. Instead, they decided to not convict the cop that fired the weapon (the only one you could convict here, but this has it's own nuances and difficulties which means due to the more generic article here and lack of info on the shootout, I'll refrain from comment on wether the choice here was good or not, so I'll assume that they had a good reason), but charge the kids that were with the now dead kid of murder.

Let me make a metaphor to give you an idea of what they're saying. Let's say you have a cookie jar. Your mom gives you cookies sometimes. One day, your mom isn't home. You, together with your friends decide to start stealing cookies from the jar. Your mom catches you stealing the cookies. She punishes you and your friends for stealing the cookies, but, as it turns out later, one of the cookies your friends ate was poisoned (over date or something, doens't really matter here), and now their mom wants you to pay the hospital bill because their son/daughter is now lying in the hospital for the cookies they chose to steal.

Would you pay that hospital bill? I wouldn't, and I don't think anyone else with 2 brain cells would.

I'll admit that my metaphor doesn't exactly match up, but you get what I'm trying to say here hopefully: it's shifting the blame from someone else's actions to people who, at worst had the offense of committing an unrelated crime on the side.

Also, I find it rather amazing that, while pedophiles get only 20 years, someone convicted of a murder they didn't even commit gets 65 years. Really goes to show where the priorities lie here.

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"It's a fiction in that it attributes a killing to you that you need not have done by your own hand"

"In a paper discussing the due process limits on accomplice liability, Heyman also called U.S. accomplice laws a "disgrace," stating that "by definition, complicity law attaches guilt to the accomplice for the criminal acts of others. Thus, no matter how trivial the assistance or commitment, she is as guilty as the criminal actor.""

I'm with this guy, especially as the comment at the bottom seems to imply it's not an isolated incident.

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So to anyone here saying "that kid should have been convicted of murder", I'd like to ask: are you insane and what reality do you live in, because I seriously doubt that anyone who is sane and is capable of a form of rational thought would think it is a good idea to start convicting others of crimes they had zero participation in comitting (regardless of how you put it, this is a cop killing someone, not the kid turning their weaponry on each other).

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Also, fuck plea deals. They're a mockery of the justice system and only exist to basically get prosecutors an easy way out without having to go through the legal system, while simultaneiously causing people to get stuck with criminal convictions of things they didn't do while also causing the poor to get a statistically higher convicted crime rate (since poor people usually have to take the plea deals because they can't afford a lawyer).

@Ev1l0rd I don't see why the cop would be convicted. According to the article it was a shoot out, which means one of the friends was shooting at the cop. A shoot out is more than 1 person involved in a gun fire. You can't have a shoot out alone by yourself, because then it wouldn't be called a shoot out.

And the court found the cop shooting justified. Now the events of who shot first, the article doesn't say much probably to create controversy because that how they get their views. They were escaping a robbery, they probably used a gun to threaten and assist with their robbery, and the cop shot them because of a possible danger to others. But this is me guessing without much details about the shooting.

@leon141 good to see that racism is still alive and well here on our grand ole forum

@SG854 - Read carefully. I said that I wasn't judging on the cop not being convicted due to lack of information on my end.

I'm judging the fact that they're convicting people for crimes they didn't commit.

@Ev1l0rd Sorry I missed that. There is just so many words and the format is all off and kind of messy it messed with my reading.

I was going off by this.
"they decided to not convict cop that fired the weapon "the only one you could convict here"

Which I thought why would the cop be the only one you can convict since the others were also involved with the shooting. It really threw me off. But you were talking about murder not shooting. Shooting which the kids would be convicted of doing.

@SG854 he has a point, the officer that killed the kid is the only one that realistically should be convicted of murder, if anyone was