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I mean as far as I can tell from the available news about the case manslaughter is the appropriate charge, the shooter fired one shot in a moment of emotion and it can be credibly claimed to be a freak accident it hit the guy at all.
They should probably throw the book at him because supposedly the road rage was triggered by basically nothing, but inappropriate charges will just let him walk.
That he fired in a "moment of emotion" isn't enough to reduce the charges from murder to manslaughter. If it were, then "I was pissed off" would be a partial defense to murder, and that's ridiculous. The test in most states is that the victim provoked the defendant to such a degree that a reasonable person would be expected to lose their composure and self-control. The canonical example is the husband who walks in on his wife's infidelity, but more typical examples would be a wife responding to years of abuse, someone learning that the victim molested their child, the victim making threats, the victim brandishing a firearm, etc. Some states explicitly require that the provoking action be illegal, or otherwise meet a series of onerous requirements. New York's statute is actually more expansive than the majority of states, in that it creates its own "extreme emotional disturbance" test rather than rely on the traditional common law definition, but it's unclear if this has any practical effect. What is clear is that the emotional disturbance has to be of an unusual nature, and not simply a response to the normal irritations of daily life.
When you look at this case, the provocation was being cut off in traffic, or "nearly getting into an accident" to use the phrasing of the defense. There are over 600 traffic accidents in New York City every day. Almost everyone who has been a licensed driver for any amount of time has nearly gotten into a dozen accidents that were avoided. I don't know exactly what happened, but based on the setup of the ramps my guess is that where two lanes were merging into one as the ramp merged onto the bridge Mr. Irving, being in the lane that was ending, sped up and cut off Mr. Romero as he merged over. As a resident of a city where it's not uncommon to have to cut across five lanes of traffic multiple times just to stay on the same road, I am familiar with the frustrations that can come from either end of the transaction, but it's hard to see any circumstance where I'd sympathize with someone whose response is to chase down the car and start shooting into it while it was moving. Even if Romero was a hair away from slamming into Irving's rear bumper, this is not the kind of experience likely to result in extreme emotional disturbance. For most people, a honk of the horn and a few choice words would be the end of it, and it wouldn't even be remarkable enough to comment on at dinner.
Romero shot at a guy and killed him. It's about as clear-cut a case of murder as one can expect. Premeditated murder would be a stretch, but he did tailgate him for a while before rolling up alongside of him and shooting, and prosecutors have successfully charged premeditation based on a lot less. (Courts have ruled that a few seconds premeditation is enough, though I disagree with this as a matter of principle and believe that the present shooting is a clear example of non-premeditated murder.) The fact that it was a longshot is irrelevant. This isn't a case of recklessness. He wasn't trying to hit a deer that jumped on an embankment and ended up hitting a driver; he was specifically aiming for Irving, and that it wasn't a high-probability shot isn't a mitigating circumstance.
Interesting, I do appreciate this correction and the detail.
Do you have any guess as to why the charges were reduced then? (apologies if you have address this elsewhere).
I hate to be cynical, but it honestly looks like they're trying to go easy on a retired cop. Some journalists have noted that the police haven't provided a photo of the alleged perpetrator, and that he was whisked in and out of the courthouse through the back door. Additionally, his entire online profile appears to have been scrubbed before his name was made public. A defense attorney interviewed by the New York Post suggests that it's because they couldn't prove depraved indifference, which, if firing a gun into a moving vehicle on a crowded highway doesn't count, I'm not sure what does. The recklessness argument is irrelevant anyway, since if that were the case he'd be charged with Second Degree Manslaughter, not First Degree.
The whole "extreme emotional disturbance" argument that's available in New York does offer another possibility, though it would be heavily dependent on the facts. For instance, if the guy owned a failing business and was having trouble sleeping over it and was on his way back from a meeting where the deal he thought would save the company fell through and now he has to tell his wife, who is already suggesting they get a divorce since he left his good job at the foundry to pursue a hare-brained business venture, that the bank was probably going to foreclose on their house and they'd have to pull the kids out of college, and he found himself in the parking lot of the Harrisburg Coat Outlet three hours after the shooting with no idea how he got there and no recollection of the incident, the event might qualify as an extreme emotional disturbance under New York law. The whole thing sounds to me like a "don't call it an insanity defense", and like temporary insanity defenses, it seems unlikely a jury would buy it. Unlikely enough, at least, that as a prosecutor I'd at least make them argue it as a defense at trial and wouldn't automatically reduce the charges.
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"Freak accident" is a bit much, but road rage killings do seem to meet the definition for manslaughter - strong emotion, little malice aforethought.
I really don't understand road rage. I have thoughtful, patient friends who get behind the wheel and suddenly become raging monsters at the slightest provocation. Seems to me that if you are prone to crashing out on the road you shouldn't carry your revolver with you, but whatever.
Also, seems Romeo retired in his 30s after being shot in the shoulder.
See my above comment, but road rage is very much not the definition of manslaughter. Manslaughter requires an unusual emotional disturbance predicated on an amount of provocation that would cause an ordinary person to snap. There was a road rage killing in Pittsburgh this summer where a guy got out of his car and shot a guy who didn't pull all the way up to the stop line at a red light. This isn't the kind of thing where we say "Oh yeah, I totally understand why he would have flown off the handle and killed someone".
Oh interesting, thanks for the correction. Out of curiosity, what would be an example of provocation that would cause an ordinary person to snap? If they both got out of their cars and started exchanging harsh words, would that lean towards manslaughter?
The canonical example is a spouse walking in on an act of adultery and killing one of the parties. Some states require that the act be illegal. So something like finding out your son's baseball coach was molesting him or that your employee drained the company funds to finance a gambling spree might qualify. Some states have held that it's a sort of modified version of the battered wife defense, where long-term domestic abuse would count as sufficient provocation to reduce the charges to manslaughter if the provocation weren't severe enough to be justifiable self-defense. In the same vein, some states allow manslaughter in the case of incomplete self-defense, where the defendant genuinely but unreasonably feared for his life. Mutual combat would be another example, where the perpetrator develops the intent to kill during the course of the fight. I would also add that the killing has to take place before the perpetrator has time to reflect on his actions. If the coach admits he's been abusing your son and your immediate reaction is to beat him to death, that's a better case than if you drove to his house armed after your son told you he'd been abused. But, like I said, it's reserved for unusual cases where a juror would say "I understand that as a society we can't allow people to get away with this, but I understand why the guy would have gone to those extremes". It's not for cases—like getting dumped, or fired, or cut off in traffic—that normal people experience on a regular basis without getting the urge to kill.
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I once read a theory about road rage. If you're walking on the footpath and someone walking the other way bumps into you, they will usually acknowledge their error in some way. They may not actually say "sorry" or "excuse me", but they will at least raise their hand, make an apologetic facial expression, or make some kind of gesture to indicate they know they're at fault. Whereas if someone knocks into your shoulder without even acknowledging their error, we tend to interpret it (understandably) as a personal insult, and react accordingly.
When driving a car, you often can't see the faces of the drivers in the other vehicles (and vice versa). The person who cut you off in traffic may not have intended to do so and may feel very embarrassed about their error, but there's often little they can do to signal their remorse other than maybe sticking on their hazard lights for a second, which you may not even notice. What this means in practice is that drivers are far more likely to interpret mishaps on the road as deliberate personal slights about which the perpetrator feels no remorse, rather than unfortunate errors made in a split-second by flustered drivers who feel embarrassed by their own carelessness.
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I find driving tremendously stressful, because I am acutely aware that unless I pay perfect attention to all the things going on in the road and respond accordingly, I risk death for me and my passengers. So from that perspective I could see road rage, your life is at stake constantly and the object of your ire presumably threatened it.
But I recognize this view is abnormal: driving is statistically one of the most dangerous things you do, but I don't think most people know that, much less internalize it. I probably don't internalize it properly either, I'm sure I'm doing things that are statistically risky while driving.
I wonder if this is an early precursor to the Internet's anonymity and echo-chamber issues? When someone's in a car they don't interact face to face with the other drivers (you can sometimes see a face if you strain, but it will just be a second or two snapshot before your attention has to go elsewhere, the equivalent of a profile picture), they're just faceless others that only come to the driver's attention when they do something stupid. Everyone in the car with you is somewhat on your side, or at least will rarely take another random driver's side or argue with you about the situation. And when you finally come face to face with the other guy, you've had ages to convince yourself he's evil and you're past the point of humanizing him.
I mean sure but most of the road ragers I know tend to be way more militant about traffic and parking issues as opposed to freeway stuff. Obviously you can still die from a low speed collision but the stakes are significantly lower in terms of peril
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In general the psychology seems to be the people you'd expect and people who are stressed, often because of work, close proximity, frustration at their commute and so on.
If you are a normie and don't live in a congested area it won't make visceral sense, but if you live in a congested area with shitty driving and crazy people making getting home hard, you should be able to get a whiff of the thing.
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A person trained to use firearm, draw the weapon, pointed it at another person at short range, pulled the trigger and by some "freak accident" the other person died. Can you point at the freaky part, because that is the expected outcome?
Freak accident is if he was shooting at him with airsoft gun and a stray bullet from a gang shooting 3 blocks away fired at ballistic trajectory somehow hit him in the neck at the same time.
Yeah like it's still extraordinary behavior to fire a gun at somebody over a driving situation even if unlikely to actually hit. I feel like manslaughter stuff would make more sense if he brake checked him then somehow some extraordinary sequence of events happened that led to a crash fatality off a very minor collision or something
Yeah, I agree. As I mentioned in my post, this seems to fit in with the legal concept of "depraved heart" murder.
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I'd be interested to know (1) how fast the two cars were moving; (2) whether the windows were opened; and (3) whether reports are correct that the bullet ricocheted off the headrest. Quite possibly the fatality was a freak event in some sense.
I'm not an expert, but I think it would be pretty difficult to deliver a fatal shot from one moving car to another; through a closed window; with your blood pumping and while also driving a car. I don't have either the specific facts or even much in the way of background knowledge. I do know that shooting accurately usually requires focus and it's difficult to focus when you are driving a car, especially if you are in an extreme emotional state.
I'm pretty sure that if I were in that situation, I would have a hard time pulling out my cell phone and dialing 911, let alone drawing a handgun and delivering an accurate shot.
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I mean its not truly a "freak accident" but one shot, it being fatal, while driving on a bridge is pretty unlucky for the victim. Just firing one shot also adds to the claim, should he make it.
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