How's this for a verdict?

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Must admit I actually agree with Shoshino and Joa on this one. I'm all for eliminating a threat, but there is no need to be excessive* in such a manner

(*Nearly wrote 'inefficient' there... can tell I've been larping )

 

No sympathy from me for the robber either. It us a well known fact that I despise criminals. I have no use for them. The pharmacist may have gone overboard, sure, but he's just a guy trying to make an honest living, and he shouldn't gave to put up with armed criminals robbing him. The sentence is a disgrace.

IMHO, if one gang member is armed, they all are and they all deserve to be dealt with by those they attempt to victimize with lethal force. Don't wanna die? Don't commit crimes.

 

@LKD I'm glad you're not a cop. You'd be police brutality waiting to happen.

 

If that kid hadn't attempted to rob a pharmacy, he'd still be alive today. The stupid bastard brought this on himself.

 

True enough.

Also true - if that stuipid pharmacist hadn't decided to unload an extra five bullets into the kid's body, he wouldn't be a convicted murderer today. He brought that on himself.

 

I don't know anyone who trains that way though. Especially when you're not expecting to be attacked. You may as well be asking the guy to shoot the gun out of the assailant's hand, old western style.

Although doing the latter always accomplishes the former...

True - although Giffords received nearly immediate aid, probably from the best doctors in the area of Arizona. I doubt this kid would have received the same treatment.

Oh don't get me wrong - I don't feel badly that the would-be robber was shot and killed. As the title implies, I was asking more about the verdict of the pharmacist.

Yeah, no doubt there. I was just asking that if it could be proven that the shot to the head was fatal, you couldn't really charge the guy with murder. I don't see any reason why this case wouldn't be appealed. I mean, getting life in prison is a stiff sentence - he couldn't do much worse if they can find (which they almost certainly can) grounds for an appeal.

 

Only to people who selfishly commit criminal acts against others!

However, I would not be an effective cop in that I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with a shotgun at 10 feet!

In all seriousness, I'm the type of person who usually tries reason and logic via conversation first. I had that reputation at the high school where I worked. However, if a student chose to be arrogant, disrespectful, and unreasonable despite my efforts at being compassionate, I turfed them with few regrets.

People have the right to defend themselves and their businesses, and sometimes they have to do it now, as the police cannot magically appear in milliseconds. In a heightened stress situation like the one presented here, one that the robbery victim had no part in creating, I think some leeway ought to be given for poor decisions made under stress. We all know that if the teen holding the gun had killed the pharmacist, he would have gotten a very light sentence because of the long sob story about poverty, minority group membership, bad parenting, bad schools, etc etc that his sleazy lawyer would have told the judge. It's a sad day when a poor judgement made in the heat of the moment results in such harsh punishment for an otherwise decent person.

 

I agree about the light sentence, but I disagree with the reason. The reason he would not have been given life in prison is that he was 14.

 

Question for the lawyers: how much time is required for there to be premeditation? My initial reaction to this is to favor a second degree murder charge/conviction, because unless we're really missing something, Ersland didn't 'plan' to kill the kid anymore than he planned to get robbed. He didn't sit up the night before, drawing diagrams and going over his strategy. What he did do, as near as we can tell from the video, is decide to finish the kid off over the course of the minute or so between the first shot and the next five. Does that constitute genuine premeditation? If it does, I would think there are a lot of people in the general population with anger management issues who are at risk of becoming first degree murderers.

Somehow I have a hard time thinking Murder 1 when the guy no more had killing the kid on his mind at 5:40 p.m. than what he wanted for dinner. But a second degree "crime of passion" thing, sure. It wasn't an accident, and it doesn't appear to have been justifiable self defense.

Another thing that makes me wonder is that he didn't hide his actions. Adrenalin can make you kind of mindless, but I would still tend to think that he would remember his security cameras and know that what he did was going to be recorded. Not to mention that any coroner would easily conclude that the nature of the last five shots were close range, tight placement - which would mean he couldn't make the case that he shot the kid from across the room while he was standing upright. He had to have known that he would be required to explain himself. This suggests that he didn't think that was he was doing was wrong or worth hiding, or at least that he didn't think it through. Again, this doesn't justify murder, but it may go a ways toward describing his state of mind at the time. It looks like adrenalin-fueled agitation with maybe a dash of panic thrown in, combined with intense anger and resentment at being victimized in such a way. i.e., a crime of passion.

 

Gaear,

In the grand jury I sat on a couple of years back, we had a similar situation in one of the many cases brought before us. In this case, it was a disagreement between neighbors. The one pulled a gun, so the other one pulled his gun, shot to agressor in the arm, causing him to drop the gun and fall over. Once on the ground, he shot the guy again, this time in the chest, killing him.

Since it was a grand jury, I don't know if they guy was ever convicted, but we sent it up to court on a 1st degree murder charge. The attorney agrued (persuasively) that the time between the 1st and 2nd shots - which was only seconds mind you - was enough to go from self defense to murder. As soon as the guy dropped the gun and fell over, the shooter had the option of going over to him (while keeping the gun on him) and picking up the aggressors gun which was lying a few feet away from him.

 

Yes, people tend to fail to grasp that we have essentially two separate legally relevante incidents here: First, the self-defence against the imminent attack (i.e. the robbery) and second, everything that happened after that attack had been stopped.

The first part was self-defence and had he left it at that he would have not even committed a crime, since the justification of self defence prevents criminality.

As for the second part, the pharmacists could no longer justify his actions through self defence. In the absence of a justification deliberately killing a man is a very serious crime, murder.

As I said before, only because sometimes it is necessary to kill an assailant in self-defence, which is then not criminal, having been attacked as some point does not grant a right to kill beyond an ongoing attack.

However, self defence doesn't force a self-defender to use milder means. It suffices if the action is suitable to end the attack.

 

Yeah, it looks that way. Thanks for all the infos.

 

The other part of this, which the lawyers always forget, is that it doesn't matter as we have a dead scumbag. People who are not lawyers can see that there is a difference between "The law" and "Justice" and occasionally believe that "Justice" is more important to society then "The law" is. I know that seems blasphemous to some, but to others it will make perfect sense.

In this case (and judging by the on-line poll at the link) more people seem to believe that Justice is more important. I'm sure many of the same people if they were on the grand jury that Aldeth sat on might see it differently in that case and decide that "The Law" is more important.

 

I agree with you completely, I just understand the rationale of why so many people don't care what the law says and believe he should have been found not guilty or feel that he is deserving of a pardon or some such thing.

I know I have a few things that I don't really care what the law says. In my case mercy killing is a big one. When it comes to dead criminals I think I go case by case.

 

Can you tell us why it (apparently) makes perfect sense to you? If what the guy did was "justice" then it is nothing more than vigilante justice. Which is kind of why we have.... laws.

I guess my main question is if the pharmacist did not shot him an additional five times, and had simply called 911, do you feel that justice would not have been served? I mean, while people who get shot in the head hardly ever go on to live productive lives (assuming they even survive) they are also likely to not return to a life a crime, as they're too busy trying to learn how to talk, walk, etc., again.

 

I'll try. The laws of a civilized society only work if people are willing to obey them. I think the one thing most people can agree on is that we haven't been able to legislate criminals away. Stricter gun control laws don't stop criminals from using guns while committing a crime, lowering the legal blood alcohol level for driving doesn't prevent drunk people from getting behind the wheel of a car, etc. You used the phrase "vigilante justice" as if that would have a negative connection with most people. If you look at pop-culture I believe you will see that most people do not have a negative connection to that term. If they did, Charles Brosnan wouldn't have had a movie carear doing all of those "Death Wish" movies, the entire concept of superheroes wouldn't exist, The Punisher has been one of Marvel's top selling books for decades, etc.

I don't think you will find too many people who honestly believe that the courts and police are keeping everyone safe. I don't believe it said in the article, but it sure seems like a safe bet that at least one (if not all) of the people involved with the holdup probably had some sort of prior criminal background.

So yes, you are correct that in a perfect situation the police would have shown up, arrested all of the criminals, and they would have spent a long time in prison. Reality says that in all probability, they would have made bail at some point and could have caused more problems for the storeowner, or they would do a little bit of time and then come back to the same neighborhood and then caused more potential problems for the storeowner and the community.

Instead, the way it turned out the store and the community have one less criminal to worry about and I believe most people (including myself) chalk that up to a victory for the good guys and therefore hate to see the Pharmacist (who in all probably before this happened was a law abiding good citizen) go to jail. I don't think anyone has concerns that if the Pharmacist is released he will go on a killing spree and is a threat to society, he is only a threat to people who come in to his store to rob him.

 

The fact is that most people do obey the Rule of Law because they want to live in a civilized society. That's the reason we have trials and juries, etc. I've noticed this anti-Rule of Law attitude growing within the conservative movement of late. You are on a dangerous road with that, Snook.

It's mostly a fantasy world that has no test in reality, only within people's imaginations and popular mythology. It's not rational to give ourselves over to propaganda and myth-making, which is what that suggests.