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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32445 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Actually from a legal perspective you’re wrong - helping restrain someone so that they can be more effectively executed makes you an accomplice. Once again, I ask why no one is calling for these people to also be prosecuted, when Chauvins fellow officers who didn’t even touch Floyd all got heavy sentences?

No, in New York, as in most places, an aider and abettor must share the intent of the perpetrator:

Section 2 of the Penal Law makes a principal in the crime charged any person who "aids and abets in its commission". It does not, however, make one a principal merely on the basis that, in retrospect, we may say that in an objective sense this person was helpful or of use to the actual perpetrator of the crime. There is a subjective element as well. As one legal scholar has pointed out, "An aider and abettor must share the intent or purpose of the principal actor, and there can be no partnership in an act where there is no community of purpose." (1 Burdick, The Law of Crimes, § 221, p. 297.) That intent is required for one to be held liable as a principal on the basis of his having aided and abetted the perpetrator of the crime of murder was pointed out in People v. Monaco (14 N Y 2d 43) where this court said: "In the absence of some statutory synthesis of intention which makes out any homicide to be murder, intended or not (such as Penal Law, § 1044, subd. 2, in respect of a person engaged in felony), whether a homicide is committed `with a design to effect' death depends on adequate proof of such a design by each person charged." (14 N Y 2d 43, 46; emphasis supplied.)

So you think Penny’s intent was to kill a homeless person on the subway that day? Interesting. What evidence do you have for your belief?

I don't know where you get the idea that I think that, because I don’t. He obviously didn't. He intended merely to render him unconscious. In fact, it was you who implied that he intended to kill him; you said, "helping restrain someone so that they can be more effectively executed makes you an accomplice."

The point is that you were wrong when you say that merely doing something that assists someone in committing a crime makes one an accomplice. It doesn't.

"helping restrain someone so that they can be more effectively executed makes you an accomplice."

That’s the argument from the pro punishment side which is who I was originally arguing with but it looks like it was a different user. I don’t believe it was an execution

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