Death Penalty?
- Thread starter HALL85
- Start date
Should be on the table….but it’ll never happen. They’ll be tried as adults, but I doubt the death penalty will be part of the equation. The video is absolutely infuriating. They knew exactly what they were doing and had no regard for human life. They should be put down.
What cold hearted people! While terrible, this is not a death penalty case. That said, they deserve a minimum 30 years.
As someone who worked on a death penalty case and have reviewed another, I have mixed emotions. I was always in favor of the death penalty and still am in theory. But after seeing what I have seen, I am against it as a policy. While the case I was working on was certainly worthy of the death penalty, the one that I reviewed was tried as a death penalty case. The defendant did not get the death penalty but life. While reviewing this case, it became clear something was very wrong with the case. It was a difficult case to review 20 years later as people had died. But my conclusion was that the original defendant was actually innocent. This case ended up being the impetus for politicians to abolish the death penalty in NJ.
As someone who worked on a death penalty case and have reviewed another, I have mixed emotions. I was always in favor of the death penalty and still am in theory. But after seeing what I have seen, I am against it as a policy. While the case I was working on was certainly worthy of the death penalty, the one that I reviewed was tried as a death penalty case. The defendant did not get the death penalty but life. While reviewing this case, it became clear something was very wrong with the case. It was a difficult case to review 20 years later as people had died. But my conclusion was that the original defendant was actually innocent. This case ended up being the impetus for politicians to abolish the death penalty in NJ.
But when there is both video evidence and he implicates himself for committing the crime?
The first problem is that in order to be death penalty eligible, you have to have the intent to kill or to cause serious bodily injury. Here, they want "to bump" the cyclist, running him over certainly would show intent. But bumping May show an intent to hurt not kill or to cause serious bodily injury resulting in death. Although Nevada probably has different standards for Murder than NJ.
I think this can be overcome in this case. There were different criteria that the murder has to have in order to be death eligible I.e killing a child, murder during the commission of a sex assault kidnapping or robbery, murder for hire. There were factors that could trigger a death eligible case. Most states have a list of factors. The one factor that is usually the key is that it was committed in a particularly heinous act.
Although the sufficiency of the evidence is great, This case lacks the triggering factor to make it death eligible. Also, the age of defendant mitigates against the death penalty. And it lacks that guttural reaction of my god this is so heinous that this person deserves the death penalty.
Contrast that to the facts in my case in which the defendant broke into an apartment and robbed, raped and then stabbed the woman 16 times and dumped her body in a bathtub. He then smothered the woman's 2 and 3 year old children. He stabbed and thought he killed the fourth person in the room which wa a 21 year old woman but she survived. This is just a heinous murder which triggered multiple factors to make it death eligible.
This present case just doesn't have the triggering factors. The State may not even prove intentional murder because there is a good argument that their intent was not to cause death just to knock him off the bike which would be a manslaughter.
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