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Notes -
I would like to discuss the recent road rage incident which took place on the Manhattan ramp to the outbound George Washington Bridge.
Evidently what happened was (1) there were two totally unrelated men both driving home at the end of the day; (2) The alleged shooter was a 62 year old retired NYPD detective named Victor Romero; (3) the victim was an off duty Con Ed worker named Koran Irvine; (4) the two had some sort of dispute over a lane change which didn't work out; and (5) Romero (allegedly) opened fire against Irving, killing him with a shot to the neck.
(I should mention that traffic in that area is almost always rather intense, drivers tend to be aggressive, and it's pretty common for people to end up in situations where they are honking their horns, yelling at each other, etc.)
In any event, based on photographs it appears that Koran Irvine was black. I haven't seen his picture, but I would guess with high probability that the (alleged) shooter is white based on his name. (The NYC area has lots of white guys with Italian-American sounding names.)
Anyway, what's interesting to me is that New York County has a Soros-style DA, Alvin Bragg. So it seems like this is a mouthwatering opportunity for him to throw the book at a white guy for shooting and killing a black guy. Especially since the black guy seems like a sympathetic victim (he apparently has a full time job and is married with children). And yet I read that the charges against Romero have already been reduced from murder to manslaughter and that he's out on bail.
What's going on here? Is my theory of mind about Alvin Bragg off the mark?
ETA: By the way, I am not familiar with the New York law of homicide, but I am aware that in general there is a principle called the "depraved heart" doctrine. The idea is that some acts are so reckless that they will imply the necessary intent for murder even in the absence of premeditation or deliberation. The classic example of this is discharging a firearm into a building which is known by the shooter to be occupied. So it seems like there is a basis here to charge the (alleged) shooter with murder even if it was just a spontaneous road rage incident.
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.
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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