Some satisfied, others outraged with verdict for immigrant's death

There has to be a law. Not murder in the first degree, but something pretty damn close to it.

 

I do not see how the use of a hate crime law would change the outcome (in this case or any other case) because the jury would have still reached the result it wanted to reach.

The story makes this result sound bad, which leads me to believe either (1) the reporter is spinning the story and leaving out important details; or (2) the prosecuters blew the case by not presenting the evidence appropriately or picking a bad jury. Of course, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

 

It wouldn't have changed the outcome of this particular case, but hate crime laws allow these types of cases to be moved to the federal circuit.

 

I am sure you would have a complete different opinion if it was your significant other...

 

That's pretty much the reason we use a jury instead of allowing the victim's family to determine the proper punishment.

Having no knowledge of the particulars except for what I read in that article I can't really comment except to say that it's a pretty sad situation for the family of the victim.

 

Reminds me of an episode of CSI where a middle eastern cab driver ran over a boy that had been shot and was walking into the street. He got out of his cab to check on it, then got back in to call for help. He didnt know the boy had been shot. He thought he had killed the boy, and was getting on his radio. The "mob" saw him get back into his car, assumed he was trying to escape, and assaulted him. Basically they compared footprints and got DNA evidence off of the victims clothing and were able to tie several of the mob members to the crime. Not death penalties, but several of them were carted off to jail.

Granted in that episode, all the potential assailants were still around when the police arrived on the scene so evidence could be collected.

 

What's your point?

Personally, I believe that our justice system is a lot better than most other countries, but flawed like crazy. Innocent people get put in jail, and much more often, guilty people get set free because that's the rules of the game.

If there isn't enough evidence, then there isn't enough evidence. Nothing written in that article showed any warrant as to some great injustice occurring by our legal standards. Look, there have been plenty of biased and down right racist juries in the history of our country. Would I be shocked if this jury wasn't straight? Hell no. But again, it's not like there's some smoking gun that the jury is ignoring. These type of acquittals happen all the time. It's our system. The only reason it's a story this time is because of the race angle.

 

Our justice system is pretty expensive and I think to let less guilty people go you have the tradeoff of putting more innocent away.

 

what are you looking for evidence of?

 

To me, it's all about who threw the first punch and who struck the fatal kick.

 

first punch, i think the fact alone that the kids were drunk puts the onus on them. final blow, not sure it really matters when you're kicked to death which was "final"

 

But don't you have to still prove that in court? I think evidence matters. That's our system. The evidence must show something. And I also think the fatal kick matters.

 

Bunch of stupid kids beat on a guy, guys dies from injuries incurred from beating. I'm not sure how much more evidence you need. If you participated in the beating, you share responsibility for the death. I'm not really even sure how that's debatable.

 

I'm far from a legal expert, and most of my ideas of how our system works comes from watching Law and Order and other shows such as Dateline stuff and Court tv stuff over the years. So maybe I'm interpreting it wrong.

I didn't hear the case so I have no idea what conclusion I personally would have come up with. But according to the article it seemed like a tough case to prosecute because of the circumstances, and a lot of y'all are saying it is exactly the circumstances that are making it a cut and dry easy case.

So I'm just wondering if y'all know of other similar cases over the years: drinking involved, group beat-up, and deadly results. What were the circumstances, what have the court results been and what evidence was available.

The only thing I can think about is some vague memory of a news magazine type show like 20/20 where a group of kids jumped this one kid in the streets (maybe like 10 years ago) and he died and some teen girl called 911 and they were asking her where she was located, even though they already knew. I don't think anyone was imprisoned. It's a terrible example mainly because my memory is mush, so sorry for that.

But you guys get what I'm saying? Of course, the drunk kids probably deserve to burn in hell and they're probably responsible. But I just don't see this specific circumstance as an easy win for a prosecuting attorney and I'm far from surprised that it was a not-guilty verdict, and this is not even taking into account the whole race angle.

 

But is SHOULDN'T be a tough case to prosecute. If anything, the article makes it look like the prosecutor was either an idiot or pretended to be one(race angle).

Rather than trying to figure out who delivered the fatal blow, which is of course impossible, they should just look at it as group killing. What's so hard about that?

 

So if there is no evidence that a particular defendant caused the fatal injuries, we should send him up the river as though there were evidence because the victim was a minority? That is just a dumb idea.

 

A first-year law student could explain why this is wrong....you do not have to prove that.

 

Did some of the kids get away or something?

Otherwise, even if you take race out of the equation, if you've got the kids that did the beating, and you got a guy who died and part of his brains are leaking out of his head, how does a simple 'assault' even make sense?

 

Actually, it depends on the state. A pre-law could tell you that.

So Sammy, tell me which of the jurisdictions that you have practiced in would hand out murder charges like they were party favors?