"The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way."

The headline is shocking, but I can certainly imagine situations like this in which a negligent parent is responsible for putting their child/fetus at risk. Is there a precedent for a manslaughter charge for something like this?

The headline is clickbait, because it omits the only important detail.

I think the headline is accurate. The fact that the pregnant woman may have started the argument or threatened the person who shot her are certainly important details to how this situation arose. The fact is that the pregnant woman was shot, and was arrested for endangering her fetus. This has a chilling effect on other pregnant women. Sometimes people argue and have heated disagreements. The idea that as a pregnant person you can now be arrested specifically because it endangers the unborn is frightening.

> The idea that as a pregnant person you can now be arrested specifically because it endangers the unborn is frightening.

As of 2015 three states criminalize substance abuse particularly during pregnancy: Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee.

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/maternity-drug-poli...

How does this make any sense? If they’re going to press charges for the shooting of an unborn baby (which isn’t new - the charge is manslaughter), the person who pulled the trigger ought to be the one charged.

The logic is that the person who shot her was acting in justified self defense, so the woman charged is the one who caused the child's death by creating the situation in which the other person justifiably defended herself.

It's a little convoluted and probably won't stand up in court.

The person who pulled the trigger was deamed to have acted in self defense and is not being charged. Getting a manslaughter charge when acting in self defense is what shouldn't make sense.

> Getting a manslaughter charge when acting in self defense is what shouldn't make sense.

The instant someone pulls a gun trigger, they assume legal responsibility for the path of the bullet, and everything it does along that path.

If I fire a shot in justified self-defense but miss and kill someone else, I can (and should) be charged with manslaughter. That makes good legal sense, as far as I can tell.

in some states that is just not true.

In some states if you rob a bank and cop shoots at you but misses and hits and kills a bystander, then YOU the robber who did NOT shoot anyone will be charged with manslaughter.

that is sort of what is happening here.

Wow, that strikes me as really unjust and backward.

So if a policeman is willfully negligent and doesn’t keep up his target practice, his own lack of skill could result in someone else being charged with manslaughter. I disagree: If anyone is charged, it should be him—though I do recognize the court would rightly not hold him responsible if a reasonably competent person couldn’t have been expected to do better.

If it worked that way, perhaps people would think twice more often before discharging a firearm - and fewer people would be harmed.

I agree. If she wasn't pregnant and died would that be considered suicide?

I can't access this article. I've read another one about the case (Washington Post) and it doesn't really get into the cause of the fight.

But it sounds to me like the root cause is probably misogyny and what a lot of people would decry as "the evils of patriarchy."

As best I can infer, some guy got a woman pregnant that he wasn't married to. Before the baby is even born, he's keeping company with some other woman, probably de facto abandoning the pregnant woman and their child in the process. The two women fought. The fetus died.

He's not likely to ever be charged with anything. We are just going to argue about which woman he was screwing should be hung high.

Particularly given that your scenario includes no allegation of rape, it seems that you're draining these women of moral agency and responsibility for their actions. Such infantalization of women is hard to distinguish from misogyny.

The woman being charged is Black. How much agency do you think a poor Black woman living in a backwards Southern state should be expected to have in a world that increasingly wants to criminalize abortion, among other things?

Blacks and women: it's your fault your lives don't work. We don't want to talk about systemic issues, like how we think all men are entitled to sex and are not to be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. If your life gets ruined because he knocked you up and promptly bailed, well, bitch, it's your fault for spreading your legs, clearly.

Next!

  a poor Black woman

The article says nothing about her economic status aside from stating that she successfully posted a $50,000 bond and was released. Assuming that she is poor because she is black is racist.

To summarize (as I had considerable trouble wading through the huge, vague articles on this proceeding), hopefully accurately:

The logic is that she committed manslaughter by dragging the infant-to-be into a violent confrontation that she started, and which she escalated to the point that force was justified in defense against her (that part seems to be considered established). Like if you involved yourself in a high speed chase with an infant in the car, and that infant died in the proceedings, you would likely be guilty of manslaughter (in Alabama and some other places).

Shooting a pregnant woman out of defence can be justified only in the U.S. In any other country in the world you have to be extra careful with weapons.

So when a pregnant woman puts somebody in mortal danger, it is somehow the victim's fault for meeting deadly force with deadly force? I don't think that would fly even here in Canada.

The law may differ on duty to retreat and other matters (though in this case the victim retreated after retaliating), but at the end of the day, there is a circumstance where use of deadly force is justified against a person, whether that person is a pregnant woman or not. You're not meant to simply roll over and die when attacked by a pregnant woman so as not to offend the sensibilities of some random HN commenter.

According to the article it was ,,a dispute with another woman over the father of the child''. Of course if it's mortal danger, things are different, but I think it's generally very hard for a pregnant woman to kill another woman without a gun. The death statistics of U.S. compared to other countries don't support the theory that guns are used only in mortal danger.

> ...but I think it's generally very hard for a pregnant woman to kill another woman without a gun

You are extremely wrong in that thought. One wrong bump on the head, and you are a goner. Don't get in a fight, don't start a fight, and don't stay in a fight you won't finish. Two average-build women fighting is perilous for the participants just like two average-build men fighting.

In the heat of an argument, one or the other is going to get the upper hand, and maybe today they don't choose a good time to stop pounding their opponent's head into the pavement. If you aren't willing to defend yourself, you can only hope that your opponent will show mercy when the time comes; I don't think it is really appropriate to ask the victim of an escalating battery to wait and see if they'll be killed once the situation is completely out of their control.

More details will probably become available, but there are circumstances that can be established, under which the charge discussed makes sense, and under which the person who fired the firearm is not guilty of an offence; such as if the pregnant woman is committing assault in the first or second degree.

> The death statistics of U.S. compared to other countries don't support the theory that guns are used only in mortal danger.

What kind of non-sequitur is that? Nobody is making that claim or any statement that could depend on it.

If I follow your logic, lethal force is justified in any physical conflict because of the risk of "one wrong bump to the head."

Depends on the degree of escalation and a tremendous number of other factors, but yes: my understanding is that in Alabama, you do not necessarily need to wait until somebody is obviously trying to kill you to respond with deadly force.

On a personal note, I agree with this. It is unjust to ask people to wait until they're dead to defend themselves, when another person has initiated force that could rapidly become deadly.

It is not uncommon that one pushes another over in anger, and that other is killed. That's not manslaughter, that's murder.

P.S: Be careful mixing up lethal with deadly, or either of those with fatal. There are subtle but important differences.

> It is not uncommon that one pushes another over in anger, and that other is killed.

What, like a cliff? No, I don't think "getting pushed over" is a statistically significant cause of death.

So if I'm in Canada and a pregnant woman tries to kill me I'm pretty much out of luck if I kill her in self defense?

You have to have a “reasonable belief that you’re in danger.” and "the level of force needs to be reasonable given the circumstances. "

In practice, prosecutors in Canada are quite likely to charge you with a crime no matter what to let the court decide rather than making that decision themselves. Once it hits court, juries are usually quite sympathetic to the self defense argument.

(Not a lawyer, this is all heresay).

Dupe from yesterday https://www.oregonlive.com/nation/2019/06/woman-charged-for-...