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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.
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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