The ludicrousness isn't about Tyler being charged (and the eggshell skull doctrine would rather be used to exculpate Tyler, although I neither think nor wish that such an argument would fly), it's about the police officer not being also held responsible, at least by the media.

As a dubious analogy, if someone schemes to get you alone in an area where a serial rapist is known to operate, in hope that you'll encounter him, and you get raped indeed, of course the schemer is guilty. But the rapist is not exculpated. Here, of course Tyler is guilty, but the officer who pulled the trigger is not exculpated.

> eggshell skull doctrine would rather be used to exculpate Tyler

This is the opposite of how the doctrine works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull

"the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them."

Paraphrasing, the doctrine says that if you do something dangerous, and it does far more damage than you expected, you are culpable for the full extent of damage and not just the damage you thought was likely.

Other related concepts are "you take your victim as they are" and "depraved indifference" murder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depraved-heart_murder).

As roel_v suggests, it is odd how far the hyper-rationalist conception of guilt differs from the law's conception. If you set into motion events with predictable risk of serious harm be prepared to be held responsible for whatever happens even if you get unlucky and "serious" escalates to "catastrophic".

You're right, I had it wrong, I though it was a valid defence.

I don't expect law nor jurisprudence to be rational, and neither possible interpretations of the eggshell skull doctrine--what it actually is and what I wrongly thought it was--would have shocked me.

Your original framing very much sounds like Tyler should just be let off the hook entirely. That is what I was responding to.

" it's about the police officer not being also held responsible, at least by the media."

Which one of these people, according to you, went into this whole ordeal with the idea "hey you know what, let's get this innocent man shot" :

   * the guy calling 911
   * the police office who ended up shooting

?

I don't know for sure, but both are likely enough to warrant an investigation. Again, one's guiltiness doesn't make the other one innocent. The only reason I don't insist on falling like a ton of brick on Tyler is that it seems obvious to me, and it looks like everyone already agrees about that part.

Moreover, I don't care much about what happens to that individual cop (as long as he's banned from ever carrying a weapon he's proved himself unfit for). The guy is dead, too late. What I care about is exemplarity: I want the next cop in a similar situation to feel like "if I pull the trigger, my career, freedom and reputation are probably over". That seems a proportionate amount of skin in the game, before voluntarily taking a citizen's life.

Yeah, he's certainly guilty of creating the circumstances.

But to what extent would the outcome have to be predictable? I'm curious...

Also shouldn't this prankster benefit from a presumption of regularity? Otherwise, don't we conclude that it's is regular for the police to shoot innocent people in stressful situations. Which seems like an irregular thing..

I'm obviously not lawyer, so maybe this is too smart, but if the police benefits from a presumption of regularity, shouldn't they prankster calling them also benefit from the presumption that the police acts _regularly_?

And what happens if that presumption erodes...

Did you google 'eggshell skull'? Because it clearly shows that legal doctrine, across many legal systems, has said for decades that no, there is no 'presumption of regularity' (at least not in the form you're hinting at here - there is a strict other definition in some legal systems which is of no relevance here). And of course, as I said above this doesn't apply directly here because eggshell skull is about the expectation of physical frailty of a person, but similar doctrines exist for other situations.

Fair point... I should have googled that.

Certainly makes sense..