Heh, we keep posting over each other. If someone became ill but did not die – even if they became, say, debilitated or disabled – you could not charge him with attempted murder. Even though if they did die you could (probably) charge him with murder. (At least, under California law.) Screwy, huh?
The reason is that attempted murder (along with attempted anything else) is what’s called a “specific intent crime.” That means you have to show that the defendant specifically intended to commit a criminal act, and took some step towards committing it, but for whatever reason failed to complete it. In other words, in this case you would have to show that the guy was trying to murder someone but failed. Under the facts as I understand them, that would be impossible to prove (and isn’t true).
On the other hand, murder and manslaughter are “general intent crimes,” meaning you just have to show that the person intended to commit the acts that led to an illegal result – in this case, that he intentionally got on a plane knowing that he was afflicted with an infectious and life-threatening disease, and that someone died as a result. Of course, murder is a special type of crime that also requires the prosecution to prove some other things about the defendant’s mental state, but like we discussed earlier I think there’s a decent argument for “implied malice” even if the guy didn’t specifically want to infect other people.
Based on what I heard on NPR, he was in a very non-infectous stage of the disease. He may have felt that the CDC’s recommendations were excessive and alarmist.
Y’know, I’m thinking about this whole “he landed in Montreal” thing.
If this thing were a true superbug (hi Capt. Trips!), I’m at ground zero. A couple hundred people flew in an airtight aircraft for 7 hours with him, and they all disembarked here, in Montreal. Most probably stayed, and are now wandering around the city doing their things…
It’s good that his wife, who was sitting next to him, is still testing negative. Makes me feel better. The fact that she’s wearing a protective mask in the picture on the Drudge site doesn’t.
“Everyone knew. … The CDC knew, doctors knew, Kaiser knew. They said, ‘We would prefer you not go on the trip,’” he said. “And that’s when my father said, ‘OK, are you saying because he’s a risk to anybody or are you simply saying it to cover yourself?’ And they [the CDC] said, ‘We have to tell you that to cover ourselves, but he’s not a risk.’”
[snip]
Speaker said after the CDC called him in Rome and told him to cancel his commercial fight plans, it didn’t offer him any help. Speaker says it would have cost $100,000 to fly back on a noncommercial airline. In effect, he said, the CDC was walking away from him and his chance for treatment at the TB facility in Denver.
[snip]
“We said, ‘Let’s get home and get to Denver,’” he said about his and his wife’s decision to leave Europe. “Both of us worried if I turned myself [in] the next day that’s it. It’s very real that I could have died there. … People told me if I was anywhere but Denver, I’ll die.”
The CDC fucked up on this one. Based on the information and choices this guy said he had, I totally understand the decision. I’d also expect him to at least assist in paying the medical fees for anyone he infected.
Also, the above is apparently his version of events - he is presumably trying to avoid being a reviled public figure, and possibly the subject of lawsuits. He may very well be telling the truth, but then again, he may not…
Yeah. I mean, there’s no question that the CDC fucked up. But none of what he said there changes the fact that he knowingly chose to put other people at risk for contracting the disease when he decided to return to the US, and he did it–by his own admission!–just to save his own skin. Sympathy meter: not rising.
Yeah, how come the MSM is fucking letting this little nugget slide? I mean WTF, put your fucking tinfoil hats on and use those brains. How can this not just fucking jump out at people? How did this ass-hat get the TB in the first place?
I’m inclined to believe the guy, simply because the alternative (that he is batshit insane and retarded and planned a wedding immediately prior to his scheduled treatment which he needed to stave off impending death) is so ridiculous. Besides, if the guy really was a danger to the rest of the world, the CDC or a government body could and should have stepped in and stopped him, especially since he asked if his travel plans were OK prior to leaving.
And ElGuapo, Michael Jackson was found innocent, and the family that tried to sue him for molestation turned out to have a history of frivolous lawsuits.
His going to the wedding isn’t even the issue, though. It’s his decision to come back, despite risks that he clearly acknowledges were dire (he says himself that he believed that he would die), that is the problem. And sure, the CDC screwed up badly, on both ends. But that doesn’t change the fact that once all the cards were on the table and he knew how serious the situation was, he still chose to put other people at risk just to ensure that he got the best possible treatment. And that’s by his own admission!
The big question is, how much risk did he put others in vs his own personal risks? I’ve seen some confusing claims in various stories and blogs and so forth about how contagious TB is, especially early on in the course of an individual case. I’ve seen some claims that this fellow is not very contagious at all, but I haven’t seen any reputable looking sources making statement about how infectious this fellow was. I have no idea how hard or time consuming it is to test for TB but with all the publicity I’m betting a lot of the people on those plane rides are clamoring for tests. So we might know more soon.
If the risks balance out then your earlier analogy about grabbing a random person to use as a shield against a crazed gunman seems pretty apt. If the risks don’t balance out, and the chances of him infecting others were very slim, then it would be more like someone driving above the speed limit and a thus a bit recklessly to get to a hospital ER quickly to get a bad injury treated.
What matters more, at least in terms of whether or not he’s a total fuckwad–is what he knew the risks to be at the time. And he acknowledges that at that point, the CDC told him straight up not to fly, and that he knew that if he turned himself in, he would not be allowed to fly. So it seems that he understood that he was a danger.
I guess the analogy would be this: if you grab a random person to use as a human shield against a crazed gunman, but then afterwards find out that the gunman never intended to shoot you, does that make you any less of a dick?
Even if the the CDC told him straight up not to fly, which I have no reason to doubt is true, in his shoes I’d still wonder if that warning was being conveyed by someone who understood and could explain the risks or some desk jockey playing CYA. In his interview (biased source, I know) he said the CDC wasn’t very informative or helpful when they called him in Rome.
The gunman analogy assumes he was directly trading someone else’s life to save his own. I think we’ll all agree that’s reprehensible. But how about trading a 50% chance of another person’s death for his own survival? How about 10%, 5%, 1%? That’s why I threw out the risky driving on the way to the hospital analogy, it’s far more comparable to those 5%/10% risk scenarios than the gunman example.
It doesn’t, though. As I said, the gunman might not shoot at you. Even if he does, he might not hit (either you or your human shield), and even if your human shield takes a bullet, they might not die. You don’t really know what the odds of any of those things are when you grab the random stranger, and that’s almost certainly TB guy’s circumstances when he said “fuck it” and got on the plane. All you know is that you’re trading more risk to others in exchange for less risk to yourself.
If anything, the human shield analogy is a little too kind to TB guy. In that analogy, the human shield person was already at risk of being shot by the gunman. The really be accurate, you’d have to grab a person who was not at risk of being shot until you grabbed them–perhaps someone hiding under a table that the gunman hadn’t seen.
