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It seems like everyone (except the victim) basically got what they wanted here. The defendant got a very lenient deal, the prosecutors are making a show of protesting but still get to count this as a successful conviction for their stats, and the state of California can use a limited prison spot on a criminal who poses an actual danger to the public. It's not like this guy is going to make a habit of murder by megaphone. It's hard to muster up much outrage when this was a one in a million unlucky outcome from a typical scuffle at a protest.
How is this case any different than the guy who got life in the United the Right accident. People protesting, chaos, scuffle followed by a dead guy.
The one who plays for the right team gets a month in prison. The one who plays for the wrong team gets life.
I don't know what video you're looking at that shows his car was struck before he accelerated, but in any case I don't see how that's relevant. There's no universe where you have a legal justification for starting a block away before driving into a crowd at 30 miles an hour.
This is one of those things from the great awakening that people just never knew.
Perhaps he should be guilty. Maybe it wasn’t enough of an attack to justify plowing. The case though wasn’t as clean cut as white supremacists plows thru crowd for no reason.
Personally I don’t see how they got reasonable doubt. No way to know what he thought was happening and sounded to me like he acted innocent after the incident.
Read my comment again. He was a block away from the crowd when he started accelerating towards it.
You'll have to post a link because I couldn't find any video showing that, but it doesn't matter. Even if someone starts shooting at me, it doesn't mean that I can just blindly accelerate forward without regard for anyone else's safety. At minimum, it's depraved indifference homicide, which is categorized as Second Degree Murder in Virginia. That's what he was originally charged with, until the prosecution found evidence of premeditation.
I can’t tell from video how fast he was going before accelerating. It does appear more acceleration occurred after his car was hit.
The premeditation evidence was weak. I’ve probably posted the same thing about plowing when protestors surround my car.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pVkD7c2D6H0&ra=m
He was clearly attacked before hitting anyone. The video angle changes makes it hard to pick up speed.
Am I reading you correctly? If your life is in danger by a mob let’s even say your family is in the car and they shoot at you that you would not accelerate to escape?
I don’t think he should get off completely for self-defense. Because a bat isn’t a gun. So even if he thought he was under attack he was wrong, but it should mitigate it. We can’t just let people claim self defense anytime their surrounded by a crowd at heated protests.
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@Rov_Scam
You guys know that the pedestrian who died, died by because he crashed into a vehicle which then struck her, not because he actually hit her with his car, right? And that in order to crash into that vehicle, he had to steer between a sizable crowd on either side of his vehicle?
Also, at some point I'd love to hear from someone who knows better what the grounds were for removing his defense attorney and assigning him a new one, apparently of the court's choosing.
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While it is effectively LWOP, he officially got a sentence more than twice as long as the guys that did the 1993 WTC bombings, which killed 6 and injured over a thousand. Absolutely absurd, radicalizing sentencing.
Some of them have even had sentence reductions and could die as free men if they make it to 100, assuming they don't get more reductions over the next couple decades.
To be clear, they weren't given sentence reductions because the judge felt sorry for them, but to comply with an esoteric Supreme Court ruling regarding what evidence is required for robbery under the Hobbs Act to qualify for mandatory minimum sentences.
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No but if the state government says "You can attack people at protests and get away with it as long as we like you and it's plausibly ambiguous," the mob can make a habit of it.
Plus the whole 'if this happens with political spectrum reversed the dead guy is a national martyr and there's riots if there's no meaningful charges filed' aspect
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