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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   585 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 13, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Court opinion:

  • Some 14-year-old urban youths are hanging out on a Philadelphia sidewalk. As a 73-year-old man walks by, a boy and a girl decide to hit him in the head with a traffic cone. He is hit once by the boy and twice by the girl, and dies of the resulting brain injuries. The entire incident is captured on surveillance video. The boy and the girl are charged with murder and conspiracy to murder.

  • The trial judge dismisses the charges against the boy. There is no evidence of conspiracy between him and the girl. Rather, after he delivered his blow and dropped the cone, she independently chose to pick up the traffic cone and deliver her own, totally separate blows. And the boy merely hit the old man once and then walked away, so there is no evidence of the "malice"—either intent to kill or reckless disregard for a high risk of killing—that murder requires (as opposed to the negligence that can support a charge of manslaughter).

  • The appeals panel reverses and remands for trial. The surveillance video clearly shows that (1) the boy dealt his blow immediately after the girl handed the traffic cone directly to the boy, and (2) while the girl was delivering her blows the boy only walked away for a few seconds, and soon returned with a smile on his face. That is evidence of conspiracy. And hitting an old man in the head with a heavy traffic cone even once is evidence of reckless disregard for a high risk of killing.

FWIW this is un-fun enough I would have preferred not to have it on the thread.

Agreed. I generally like these, because they’re fun and quirky rulings on edge cases for the law, unusual things that come up from time to time but which you wouldn’t really think about. The weird ones are the best.

This case is not that. It’s a bog-standard murder case where an unprovoked attack wound up killing someone, where the murderers did not obviously intend for the death but just as obviously did not care about whether or not it happened. There is a specific class for this kind of killing in every jurisdiction that I’ve bothered looking at, because it’s how you classify the casual killings committed by people who think violence is funny or a normal means to whatever end. The only thing unusual is how on Earth the trial judge dismissed charges in the first place, and any speculation there either stops at concluding ignorance or continues on into Culture War territory.

I find learning about random legal stuff like the necessary evidence for conspiracy and murder to be reasonably fun, personally.

Here's the security video. The link is foxnews, so there's .... oh so much javascript and other crap. The victim is fully blurred out and there isn't any gore or shocking content, but still probably technically NSFW.

The interesting thing is that there are half a dozen children who act as nothing more than curious onlookers. I could give you 5 paragraphs on Kitty Genovese, but that would be wasted here on the Motte.

Kitty Genovese

I remember learning about this stuff in my English class as a teenager (in the context of some weird psychological mystery of how nobody helped etc) and the actual story went completely over my head. After some life experience of racialised underclass dynamics and now that I google and see photos of the perpetrator and the victim... the story suddenly clicks in my head very well

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