ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LINCOLN'S FIRST MURDER CASE

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LINCOLN'S FIRST MURDER CASE: According to conventional wisdom, Abraham Lincoln was not a very good criminal defense attorney. They say he didn’t take many cases, and o...

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LINCOLN'S THIRD MURDER CASE

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LINCOLN'S THIRD MURDER CASE: When Lincoln was still a young lawyer he defended a man named Spencer Turner on a charge of murder in DeWitt County, Illinois. Oddly enough,...

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: PUBLICATION NEARS

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: PUBLICATION NEARS: The printing is done on Lincoln's Most Famous Case . I received my complimentary copies today, and the books will be in the hands of the...

A HISTORY OF EVIL IN POPULAR CULTURE

I think that I mentioned in one of my first blogs that I had 120,000 words written on The Last Murder with three chapters to go when I learned from my publisher that the word limit on the book was going to be 80,000 words. That caused me to go back with a meat cleaver and cut out what I believed to be a lot of interesting stories AND to collapse the last three chapters into a single chapter. I got the word count down to 90,000 or 100,000 and the publisher was satisfied.

I had some good stories about the post-conviction proceedings which went untold, and I had some words I wanted to say about the phenomenon of celebrity killers. I haven't had the opportunity to tell the story of the post-conviction circus (I probably never will), but I did get an opportunity to say some things about celebrity killers. I was invited to write a chapter for a book of essays entitled A History of Evil in Popular Culture (edited by Dr. Sharon Packer & Jody W. Pennington). They asked me to talk about the near-cult status Bundy gained as a celebrity killer, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity. 

At the time I had no idea how enormous a task the editors had set for themselves. A History of Evil in Popular Culture turned out to be a two volume, 850 page work.  It is set for publication in July of 2014 and is currently available for pre-order. I have no financial interest at all in the book, other than the fact that they're going to give me a free copy. It looks like I'm going to have to clear a good bit of shelf space to accommodate it.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LINCOLN THE POET

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LNCOLN THE POET: In previous posts we’ve looked at Lincoln as a sailor, a wrestler, an inventor, and a strongman. In this post we’ll look at another aspe...

ATTEMPTING THE UNINTENDED: MORE THOUGHTS ON PREMEDITATION

Right on the heels of my blog on Pundits, Pistorius, and Premeditation, I got another inquiry in a similar vein from another reporter. This question dealt with attempted second degree murder. Someone had been arrested in South Florida on a charge of attempted first degree murder, but the prosecutor had filed the charge as attempted second degree murder. The reporter wanted to know just how the heck you could attempt a crime which by definition was unintentional. I had to laugh, as I recalled a judge making a similar remark about an attempted murder case I helped defend back in the 70’s.

The facts of the case were this. Victim #1 beat the defendant up in an argument over a pool shot. Apparently he had gotten some help from the other patrons in the bar/pool hall, because the defendant left the bar with the warning “Y’all just wait. I’m going home and get my boxcutter and come back all fix all y’all MFers.” The defendant was as good as his word. Victim #1 had gone out to his car and passed out in the back seat before the defendant got back. The defendant woke him up by sticking the boxcutter in Victim #1's groin and opening a gash from groin to kneecap. The defendant was in the process of filleting Victim #1 when some other bar patrons intervened and became Victims #2, #3, and possibly Victim #4. The defendant thoroughly sliced and diced them, too. I don’t remember how many counts of attempted first degree murder they charged him with, but it was at least three. Now, as thorough a carving job as he did on the victims, it seemed apparent to me that he intended to kill someone. It wasn’t so apparent to the jury, because they came back with verdicts ranging from attempted second degree murder to attempted third degree murder to attempted manslaughter.

The judge observed that the verdicts didn’t make sense. The attempted third degree murder verdict was especially puzzling, and the attempted manslaughter verdict was downright paradoxical. but we’ll leave off discussion of that for a little later in this blog post. Let’s first look at the logical incoherence of attempted second degree murder.

According to the standard definition of attempt to commit a crime, attempted second degree murder should logically be considered an attempted murder which is intentional but not premeditated. BUT, the definition of premeditated murder is killing after consciously deciding to do so. Therefore any intentional killing is premeditated. Therefore, attempted second degree murder doesn't make any sense because if you intend to kill, you’ve got to be guilty of attempted first degree murder.  This is why some older cases say there is no such thing as attempted second degree murder. Some other courts allowed as how it didn’t make much sense, but as the law stood in Florida at the time, you had to instruct the jury on all degrees of a crime divided into degrees. (That’s no longer the law, but that’s also another story).

So we had some courts saying attempted second degree murder didn’t exist and others saying it did exist even if it didn’t make sense. The Florida Supreme Court cleared up the confusion by saying that attempted second degree murder is a crime. They had to do some mental gymnastics to make it a crime. Here’s what happened:

A defendant got convicted of attempted second degree murder and appealed, making the very logical argument that: "An attempt is committed if you decide to commit a crime, try to, and fail. If you decide to commit murder, you have premeditated a murder. Therefore, there is no such thing as attempted second degree murder." The Supreme Court decided, however, that you can commit attempted second degree murder without intending to kill someone. They explain it like this:

 "The offense of attempted second-degree murder does not require proof of the specific intent to commit the underlying act (i.e., murder). See Gentry v. State, 437 So.2d 1097 (Fla.1983). In Gentry, we held that the crime of attempted second-degree murder does not require proof of the specific intent to kill. Although the crime of attempt generally requires proof of a specific intent to commit the crime plus an overt act in furtherance of that intent, we reasoned: ‘If the state is not required to show specific intent to successfully prosecute the completed crime, it will not be required to show specific intent to successfully prosecute an attempt to commit that crime.’ Id. at 1099. To establish attempted second-degree murder of Harrell, the state had to show (1) that Brady intentionally committed an act which would have resulted in the death of Harrell except that someone prevented him from killing Harrell or he failed to do so, and (2) that the act was imminently dangerous to another and demonstrated a depraved mind without regard for human life. See Standard Jury Instructions in Criminal Cases, 697 So.2d 84, 90 (Fla.1997)." Brown v.State, 790 So.2d 389 (Fla. 2000).

 

That certainly clears everything up, doesn't it? By that line of reasoning, if I get drunk and walk toward a car with a key in my hand trying to crank up and drive off, and if somebody tackles me, then I’m guilty of attempted DUI. Or, if I do something really stupid and almost kill somebody but don’t harm a hair on their head, I’m guilty of attempted culpable negligence manslaughter. If I steal a car I've committed a felony If while driving that car I run over and kill someone, I've committed third degree felony murder. Now,  under the Supreme Court's logic, if I steal a car and almost run over and kill someone but don't hurt anyone, I'm guilty of attempted third degree murder. Given enough time, we could think of all sorts of silly scenarios that, under the Supreme Court's rationale, make people guilty of criminal attempts to commit all sorts of unintended crimes.

Now to bring this back to Pistorius. South Africa seems to me to have a much better definition of premeditation than we do in the United States. South Africa distinguishes between intending to kill and premeditating a murder. Put as simply as possible,[1] if on the spur of the moment I decide to kill, in South Africa I’m guilty of attempted intentional murder but not attempted premeditated murder. In Florida I’m guilty of premeditated murder because premeditation is simply killing “after consciously deciding to do so.” In South Africa premeditation requires some prior planning. If we had the South African definition of premeditation, then attempted second degree murder would make perfect sense. I decide on the spur of the moment to kill and fail, I’m not guilty of attempted first degree murder because there was no prior planning. I’m guilty of attempted second degree murder without having to do the mental gymnastics the Florida Supreme Court did to make attempted second degree murder a crime.

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[1] For a more full discussion of the complexities of the South African law of murder, read my post Pundits, Pistorius and Premeditation.

Cross-Examination Blog: LINCOLN USED CONCESSION-SEEKING CROSS-EXAMINATION...

Here's a contribution I made to a blog on cross-examination.

Cross-Examination Blog: LINCOLN USED CONCESSION-SEEKING CROSS-EXAMINATION...: The Crafton Murder Trial Cross-Examination Abraham Lincoln’s fame as a cross-examiner rests in large part on his decisive use of an ...

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LINCOLN'S JURY SELECTION STRATEGY

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ALMANAC TRIAL: LINCOLN'S JURY SELECTION STRATEGY: One of the enduring legends of Lincoln’s Almanac Trial (beyond his use of the almanac) is the story of how Lincoln intentionally chose a j...

JUST THINKING OUT LOUD

Fort Hood, Texas, had two incidents within the past few years of someone  opening fire on bystanders. The incidents have resulted in multiple deaths and injuries as unarmed, defenseless people have been gunned down. When the first of these incidents (the shooting by Major Nidal Malik Hassan in 2009) occurred, the Defense Department and the FBI commissioned investigations, and Congress held hearings. It seems our government was clueless as to how to prevent such incidents. The fact that they continue to be clueless was underscored by the 2014 shooting involving a soldier named Ivan Lopez.  More investigations are planned to figure out how to prevent and deal with such incidents.

It seems that the first round of investigations after the Nidal shooting resulted in a marvelous plan for dealing with such incidents, and it was put into action during this recent shooting: Soldiers of the world's most powerful army "sheltered in place" while units of the Bell County Sheriff's Office and the Texas Department of Public Safety raced to the rescue.  

I have what I think is a better idea than sheltering in place awaiting the arrival of  local law enforcement to handle the situation. My idea is simplicity itself, and I offer it in lieu of another round of expensive investigations--When somebody starts shooting people, shoot back. This will not only deal with the situation quickly and efficiently, it will save lives and deter future such incidents. Of course, in order to shoot back, you must be armed. Can we trust our soldiers to actually carry firearms? I sincerely hope so. We trust police officers to go about habitually armed, why not our military personnel on the grounds of "forts"?

Apparently they do allow military police to go about armed, because both the 2009 and the 2014 shooting sprees were stopped by the response of armed military police officers. In the first incident Sgt. Kimberly D. Munley  an armed member of Fort Hood's civilian police force shot Nidal,[1]  and in the second Lopez shot himself when confronted by an armed MP. But as the saying goes, when seconds matter, the police are just minutes away. I strongly suspect that if more of our soldiers had been armed, fewer of them would have died. Maybe the multiple investigations that will follow this incident can figure that out.

People intent on committing mass murder want to be able to kill as many people as possible before they are stopped. In order to accomplish this, they normally go to places where people are not armed. Once in a blue moon someone emulates Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in the first Terminator movie and opens fire in a police station, but he doesn't live long enough to do much damage. In 2011 a man opened fire in a New Jersey police station, injuring three officers before he was killed himself. That certainly beats the 13 dead and 30 injured in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting and even the 4 dead and 16 injured of the 2014 Fort Hood shooting.
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[1] We're not stretching a point too far when we apply the term military police to civilian officer working on a military base.