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Notes -
Strangling is continuous, choking isn't (from a wrestling perspective).
A choke has a defined end; which is a tap, unconsciousness, or death. A choke leads to unconsciousness somewhere between 5 and 15 seconds (shit is faster than you think; once it is locked in.) and brain damage/ death in 1 - 5 mins. Assuming that this was a shitty armature choke as from a guy that had a couple months of light combatives once; it is still pretty murder-y.
Any choke that is held for more than 10 minutes is as excessive as shooting a dude 7 times that reloading and giving him another 7.
Given that he surrendered himself and doesn't seem to have intended to kill the dude, manslaughter seems about right.
No, a choke ends when it's released, which can be at any time. What happens afterwards isn't part of the choke.
That clearly didn't happen here though. Neely was fighting back for much longer.
Holding a choke for 10 minutes isn't excessive if the target is still fighting back at 9:50, just like shooting someone 14 times isn't excessive if the first 13 miss.
No, I mean that a choke physiologically CANNOT last longer than about 5-15 seconds. If you have a choke on someone and they are still struggling after that long, it is either autonomic flailing and their brain is about to die or you are actually strangling them.
Basically, there are two levels here. One is there is no safe way to squeeze someone's throat; which is fine. It's not supposed to be safe, it's supposed to be effective.
Two is if you squeeze someone's throat for more than the x amount of time (which is quite short actually), it is +/- equivalent to shooting them in the chest or stabbing them.
This is actually why I think that if anyone puts their hands on you in the street you are fully justified in killing them instantly: the human animal can live through ridiculous punishment then die because throat squeeze ouch.
All this is going waaaaaaaaaaaaay off track from what I started reeeeeing about though; that being that manslaughter charges are appropriate for someone that does something that commonly results in death without premediating or intending to kill the other dude.
"Choke" has been used, by me and the people I responded to, to mean "the act of choking someone". You can, physiologically, very easily hold a choke on someone who is already dead.
If your point is the distinction between choking and strangling, that's just a terminology nitpick.
I'm pretty sure you actually got it mixed up. Wikipedia:
"A chokehold [or] choke […] is a general term for a grappling hold that critically reduces or prevents either air (choking) or blood (strangling) from passing through the neck of an opponent."
But there isn't an "x amount of time". Even when properly applied, you yourself give ranges of time, but when not (as clearly the case with Penny and Neely) it can take much longer. And you typically have the warning of unconciousness before lasting damage. The proper thing to do is to release the choke on that, not after a countdown regardless of whether he's weakly twitching or trying to gouge your eyes out.
The "something that commonly results in death" is "keep holding the choke after unconciousness". You don't expect choking someone just until they stop resisting to result in death, regardless of how long it took.
It can definitely happen quicker than 5 seconds or take longer than 15 seconds. The problem is that unconsciousness isn't always as obvious as you'd think, and so "choking someone until they stop resisting" can mean that the choke is being held long after unconsciousness and is only released upon death. That appears to be what happened here.
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Neely clearly was NOT unconscious within 5 to 15 seconds, so all the rest of your reasoning does not follow.
'cause he was getting strangled, which is impossible to do safely. Even a short strangulation routinely fucks your neck up such that you die without medical care.
So, either he was choking him in such a way he would certainly die, or he was strangling the dude (which is also bad, and also ends in death if you hold it for 10+ mins.)
If you're using "strangle" to refer to cutting off air rather than blood, then yes, it is likely that is what was happening. And no, he probably didn't hold it for 10+ minutes; it's not that long between the stations in question.
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