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Scenario A: you are at a bar and someone starts a fight with you. You fight back and due to unfortunate circumstances they fall and hit their head in such a way
by kungtotte 9y ago
Scenario A: you are at a bar and someone starts a fight with you. You fight back and due to unfortunate circumstances they fall and hit their head in such a way that they die.
Scenario B: you are angry at your neighbor for always taking your parking lot. So you acquire a gun, and in the middle of the night you sneak over to his house, break in, and shoot him while he's sleeping.
Two dead victims, two very different sets of circumstances. Should both those cases be prosecuted as murder? Given the same sentence?
- acct1771 9y agoI was imagining a scenario of "crime of passion" e.g. when someone catches their wife in bed with another man. Murder is murder. Self-defense obviously changes that paradigm completely, and because of that, I'd consider that example moving the goalposts of this discussion
- jschwartzi 9y agoCrimes of passion aren't prosecuted as murder in many jurisdictions. They're prosecuted as manslaughter. The killer didn't plan to kill anyone, but they were provoked to do so by the other parties.
- sametmax 9y agoThat's why we have judges. Here we are talking about yakuza, organized crime, not Joe or Jane having one bad moment in life.