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Drumpf's Indifference Amounts to Negligent Homicide
Trump’s Indifference Amounts to Negligent Homicide
Negligent homicide has a specific meaning in the law books. The standards of proof and categories of offense vary from state to state. But the essence is: Someone died because someone else did not exercise reasonable care.
An adult leaves loaded weapons where children can find them. A factory owner or amusement-park operator ignores the safety standards for their equipment. A motorist in a hurry, or heading back from a bar, roars through a school-crossing zone full of children. A parent leaves an infant “just for a few minutes” in a car with rolled-up windows on a baking-hot day. Prosecutors and juries draw the line between cases like these and murder, based mainly on intent. Did the person who caused the death actually mean to do harm? It’s a distinction that matters a lot to the defendant, but not to the victim. Whatever the legal outcome, a person who—except for another’s indifference to risks that should have been foreseen—would still be living and learning and loving, instead is dead.
That’s the law of negligent homicide. The ultimate legal reckoning for what we are now living (and dying) through will be a matter for legal authorities to take up, or decide to drop, when they have the evidence; I have no standing to do so. Instead, I want to consider the nonlegal, commonsense meanings of the term, and of its more gruesome-sounding cousin, manslaughter.
Many terms that have legal connotations can be useful in their plain everyday sense as well. Not everything we’d call an assault matches the state-by-state standards that define that crime. Not everything we call theft—or blackmail, or even rape—would count as such in an indictment or could be proved in court. Similarly, when removed from their courtroom and legal implications, terms like negligence and manslaughter and, yes, homicide are useful right now. They give us a way of assessing the horror a government is visiting upon its people.
An adult leaves loaded weapons where children can find them. A factory owner or amusement-park operator ignores the safety standards for their equipment. A motorist in a hurry, or heading back from a bar, roars through a school-crossing zone full of children. A parent leaves an infant “just for a few minutes” in a car with rolled-up windows on a baking-hot day. Prosecutors and juries draw the line between cases like these and murder, based mainly on intent. Did the person who caused the death actually mean to do harm? It’s a distinction that matters a lot to the defendant, but not to the victim. Whatever the legal outcome, a person who—except for another’s indifference to risks that should have been foreseen—would still be living and learning and loving, instead is dead.
That’s the law of negligent homicide. The ultimate legal reckoning for what we are now living (and dying) through will be a matter for legal authorities to take up, or decide to drop, when they have the evidence; I have no standing to do so. Instead, I want to consider the nonlegal, commonsense meanings of the term, and of its more gruesome-sounding cousin, manslaughter.
Many terms that have legal connotations can be useful in their plain everyday sense as well. Not everything we’d call an assault matches the state-by-state standards that define that crime. Not everything we call theft—or blackmail, or even rape—would count as such in an indictment or could be proved in court. Similarly, when removed from their courtroom and legal implications, terms like negligence and manslaughter and, yes, homicide are useful right now. They give us a way of assessing the horror a government is visiting upon its people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/this-is-trumps-fault/617159/
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