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I'm approaching this with no emotion and pre-judgement but based on facts. Let's take a look at what really happened: > According to the article, allegedly two

by pwaai 9y ago

I'm approaching this with no emotion and pre-judgement but based on facts. Let's take a look at what really happened: > 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.

tptacek 9y ago
This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me?
- pwaai 9y ago
  > This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me? 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.
  - stickfigure 9y ago
    Prosecutors will get to describe the crime in any frame they choose, and a jury of humans will get to decide whether it's murder. 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.
    - aseipp 9y ago
      People already have the gamer tags of the two people involved in the shooting (the swatter and the person he was intending to swat, but who gave a false address) and even have tweets from the alleged perpetrator (now deleted) who claimed he wasn't responsible. So yes, it's a very short matter of time before police start knocking.
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    Did you even read the section you italicized? 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?
jstarfish 9y ago
> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill 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.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  >Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting 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.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    So then, you're pretty sure SWATting is going to stop pretty much completely now that everyone knows someone might get killed when it happens? Didn't think so.
    - ryanlol 9y ago
      Of course not. There's no lack of people who'd commit murder over the internet if they could. 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.
      - FireBeyond 9y ago
        Yeah, you're right. It's usually only people's pets that get killed. Or their kids that need to go to the ER with blown eardrums from flash bangs. Just a "prank", for the most part... An entirely unforeseen circumstance and byproduct of merely trying to "inconvenience" the victim...
krschultz 9y ago
Plenty of people that had no intention to kill someone end up in jail for homicide after they do something that they didn't believe was going to kill the other party. SWATing wouldn't be a threat if there wasn't some (small) chance that someone gets hurt. Kind of like how pushing someone at a bar doesn't always end in death, but when the guy you push hits his head on a barstool on the way down and cracks his skull open, it's homicide.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill “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.
- pwaai 9y ago
  Intent to kill was used as the original reasoning from parent's post which I refuted with logic and reasoning that was met with an attack on my character and "malice aforethought" which still requires proof that calling SWAT == calling HITMAN, was thrown without understanding the full sequence of events that led up to the event. 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.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    The twitter messages and recordings should be well receivable evidence. An intend to kill might be far fetched but an intend to harm is not.

by pwaai 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago

This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me?

pwaai 9y ago
> This is logic that says that if I point a gun at a crowd of people and shoot blindly, I haven't "murdered" anybody, because there was no one person I intended to kill, and, in fact, I might just as easily have gotten lucky and killed nobody, so what intent could exist to prove against me? 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.
- stickfigure 9y ago
  Prosecutors will get to describe the crime in any frame they choose, and a jury of humans will get to decide whether it's murder. 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.
  - aseipp 9y ago
    People already have the gamer tags of the two people involved in the shooting (the swatter and the person he was intending to swat, but who gave a false address) and even have tweets from the alleged perpetrator (now deleted) who claimed he wasn't responsible. So yes, it's a very short matter of time before police start knocking.
- monktastic1 9y ago
  Did you even read the section you italicized? 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?

jstarfish 9y ago

> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill 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.

ryanlol 9y ago
>Trying to get the target "accidentally" shot is the entire point of SWATting 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.
- tptacek 9y ago
  So then, you're pretty sure SWATting is going to stop pretty much completely now that everyone knows someone might get killed when it happens? Didn't think so.
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    Of course not. There's no lack of people who'd commit murder over the internet if they could. 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.
    - FireBeyond 9y ago
      Yeah, you're right. It's usually only people's pets that get killed. Or their kids that need to go to the ER with blown eardrums from flash bangs. Just a "prank", for the most part... An entirely unforeseen circumstance and byproduct of merely trying to "inconvenience" the victim...

krschultz 9y ago

Plenty of people that had no intention to kill someone end up in jail for homicide after they do something that they didn't believe was going to kill the other party. SWATing wouldn't be a threat if there wasn't some (small) chance that someone gets hurt. Kind of like how pushing someone at a bar doesn't always end in death, but when the guy you push hits his head on a barstool on the way down and cracks his skull open, it's homicide.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> There is no proof that the accused party intended to kill “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.

pwaai 9y ago
Intent to kill was used as the original reasoning from parent's post which I refuted with logic and reasoning that was met with an attack on my character and "malice aforethought" which still requires proof that calling SWAT == calling HITMAN, was thrown without understanding the full sequence of events that led up to the event. 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.
- user5994461 9y ago
  The twitter messages and recordings should be well receivable evidence. An intend to kill might be far fetched but an intend to harm is not.