Maybe they'll get manslaughter on a plea.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2014/07/23/new-yorks-top-court-e...
The level of culpability, not least the causal connection here is hundred fold weaker. Casual reading of the law rarely lines up with established case precedence.
At the precinct, defendant admitted that he stole the minivan, exceeded the speed limit, and swerved into oncoming traffic as he fled the police. In explaining his driving, defendant said he tried to avoid hitting cars and pedestrians, and that he did not know the neighborhood well and drove down the one-way streets by mistake. Defendant said he was lost when he ended up on Manhattan Avenue, and that he was avoiding cars as he evaded the police. According to defendant, he was going against traffic and looking in his rearview mirror for the police immediately before he struck the victim. When he looked forward again, defendant said he saw the victim and that he thought he "hit the girl in the hand or something." When he saw more people and traffic two blocks later, defendant decided to crash into the parked car to avoid hurting anyone else. He also expressed remorse for his actions.
It's easy to make the argument that SWAT-ers do the opposite of what this person did and are in fact more culpable: they deliberately, competitively, and with care create circumstances optimized to put lives at risk. They don't just call the police; they call fake active shooting incidents to the police.
Read the case you just cited. It overturns a depraved indifference conviction and so goes deep into the details on this.
> "Depraved heart second-degree murder requires a conscious disregard of the risk, sufficient under the circumstances, to manifest extreme indifference to the value of human life. Recklessness that can be assimilated to purpose or knowledge is treated as depraved heart second-degree murder, and less extreme recklessness is punished as manslaughter. Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. This language describes a kind of culpability that differs in degree but not in kind from the ordinary recklessness required for manslaughter."
So yes, you still need to show proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this was a prank gone wrong. Unless the accused called assassins, it's going to be hard to argue intent.
Ordering armed people who expect to fight an armed murderer with multiple hostages is not a prank.
> According to the article, allegedly two Call of Duty players were threatening each other over a $2 bet. One call of duty member gives the other a fake address when the other threatens to SWAT him. Police go to the fake address and shoot somebody. Guy who got shot couldn't have possibly prevented the situation and is ironically the least at fault of anybody involved.
There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill, in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
Involuntary manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought.
Of course I'm not a lawyer but I refrain from allowing emotions to taint the lens of truth. I've yet to see any constructive counter arguments from you, instead you've sidetracked the debate by attacking my character.
No, in the example you've presented, that is directly demonstration of intent to kill using a device (a gun) that has high probability of death. That is not the point I've made and you are attempting to bend what was said.
Conviction of depraved heart second-degree murder requires PROOF that the defendant acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.
"There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill"
It does not require that they "intended to kill." It just requires that they "acted recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life." You find it hard to believe that anyone could consider it reckless (and indifferent to the life of the victim) to send a team of gunmen, who you've explicitly instructed to be on high alert?
Assuming this player is in an extraditable country, I predict he's going to rot in jail for the rest of his life. It's not like he was playing CoD through TOR. He won't be hard to find.
So yes, it's a very short matter of time before police start knocking.
Who are you trying to fool here?
Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting. If it weren't, they would have called family and child services to fraudulently report child sex abuse, animal control to report an escaped rabid panther, or any number of other government bodies that don't show up to the party with fully-automatic assault rifles.
The victim was shot because he refused direct police order and endangered himself by making the SWAT thinking he had a gun.
The guy calling the SWAT is an effete asshole but there's no way he could've predicted the endangerment that the victim put on himself by directly refusing orders to keep his hand up (he didnt and he was shot thinking he was pulling a gun).
So if you wanted to prove intent to kill, you'd have to
1) Show the probability of getting killed by SWAT vs Hitman is the same, which the judge will throw out as intent.
2) Show that the SWAT caller could've predicted that victim would put himself in danger by disobeying a direct armed officer.
3) Retrospectively show intent to kill in previous SWAT calls the perpetrator has been charged for.
This is just the harsh realities of court. It's very hard for prosecutors for cases like this, especially when the public is so skewed to one version of the story. It's ironic that such zealous energy from the mob crowd will only hurt the case, the internet and the mob mentality doesn't prevail against examination of facts and evidence....
Hence this is why I stopped pursuing a legal career...because I realized that true justice will rarely be delivered. To convict someone, you need more than just conjectures and emotional response, you are up against highly intelligent defense lawyers who are expert in raising doubts in those that react with emotion, not logic.
Nonsense. The point is to cause incredible inconvenience to the victim, not to kill them. Most of the time the cops will probably waste a few hours of your day, and make you look pretty bad in front of your neighbors.
This is quite possibly the first death after thousands of swattings, it seems unreasonable to assume that the perpetrators wouldn't be aware of how rarely this actually happens.
Didn't think so.
I simply believe that the vast majority of the people engaging in this activity do not do so with the intention of actually killing the victim.
I don't expect there to be a significant decline in swattings.
I believe deaths caused by swattings are far too rare for that to be a common motivation.
Just a "prank", for the most part... An entirely unforeseen circumstance and byproduct of merely trying to "inconvenience" the victim...
>Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting.
Is usually not correct.
So when you react with such vulgar statements and continually attack others who present facts and evidences against your conjecture, it's hard to take you seriously.
You keep thinking the accused somehow had blood lust without even looking at all the pieces. It's so easy to jump on the bandwagon, but there's always those that choose logic over passion, this is what the legal industry is about.
This may be the first death as the direct result of a prank call, but it is far from the first accidental death as the result of a swat team being deployed.
If inconvenience were truly the goal, a prank call to child services that launches an investigation would work much better. But that's not the outcome the caller actually wants to see happen.
SWAT teams are not deployed by the police when they think that it is likely that they will need to behave inconveniently to someone, they are deployed when the police think that it is likely that there will be a need for overwhelming deadly force.
The point of falsely triggering a SWAT team is not to cause inconvenience through police.
The point of triggering a SWAT team is to deliberately risk someone's life.
Great white sharks rarely eat people.
However, if I admit to having deliberately pushed someone into the water with a great white shark to see what would happen and then they get eaten, quoting the probabilities is not going to impress a court very much.
Unfortunately, it wasn't as if the SWAT team were going in guns blazing. The victim specifically chose to put his hands down when ordered to keep it up. He failed to do so and that resulted in his death.
Seeing the huge number of SWAT cases, this is the first time that I'm aware of, where a person has been deceased. To make the argument that calling SWAT team to somebody's house is akin to calling a hitman to your house is ludicrious.
The case falls further apart because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved, there's no way they could've predicted the victim would disobey police orders that put himself in danger.
“malice aforethought”, as noted uphtread, isn't the same thing as “intent to kill”. Gross recklessness/depraved indifference is also malice aforethought.
> in fact it was a random address that another third party had posted, and somebody decided to pull a prank that went horribly wrong.
SWATting is a “prank” which inherently involves the mental state of depraved indifference; the fact that the target endangered is different than the one the “prankster” expected is fairly immaterial.
The victim was killed because he disobeyed direct orders from an armed officer. At the end of the day, this is what boils down to, not what he said or she said.
As I said, calling SWAT to somebodys house is not the same as calling hitman to whack somebody. Even in cases involving spouses calling hitman on their estranged lover, it takes an awful lot of evidence to get a malice aforethought and even more damning evidence to get intent to kill.
This is just the reality of working under a legal system that relies on evidence presentable to a neutral third party. If anything, the internet mob mentality will hurt this case as the judge will throw out anything related to the notion the prank caller technically called armed hitman, because the prosecutor will need to show evidence that the accused knew the target victim would willingly disobey armed police officer, which is impossible because the victim was unknown to any of the parties involved.
An intend to kill might be far fetched but an intend to harm is not.
that requires malice aforethought which must meet the following criteria in some jurisdictions in US:
> Intent to kill
Just because they called SWAT doesn't show intent to kill. Hard to prove even if the accused has threatened to kill the gamer because calling SWAT is not like calling a hit squad.
> Intent to inflict grievous bodily harm short of death, Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"), or Intent to commit a dangerous felony (the "felony murder" doctrine).
So this is where the problem lies with your argument. The accused did not call or hire assassins which would suggest intent to kill. The accused could not physically hurt or threaten the life of the deceased by calling SWAT because that would mean its common knowledge SWAT are hired guns.
At best involuntary manslaughter makes sense. If there was a law in place before this event, specifically aimed at protecting people from getting SWATTED, then there's a small chance in escalating the charges.
I'm equally frustrated at the lack of laws and punishment to deter SWATing, but this is a side effect of the militrilization of local security apparatuses.
But like other tragedies in America, it will do little to deter the trend, as it is clearly divided on excessive force. Proponents will claim guns will keep the government in check....against a suite of surplus military hardware used to invade a few countries.
This is a systematic problem, charging one man will not fix the situation. Of course, after this case, people stupid enough to swat each other are going to find an increasingly less sympathetic jury. But it will happen and SWAT is not suddenly going to stop and ask if it's legit or not.
It's incredibly cowardly and shortsighted to traumatize using security apparatuses meant for true emergencies, over some ruffled egos, in a virtual, ephemeral electronic world.