LawVol13
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I will throw out the argument that a high profile case like this will draw a bigger name attorney willing to cut her a discount or draw an attorney willing to do whatever it takes in order to get his name in the spotlight.
That was the reason of my question of how she got her attorney. I have no clue.
Just for S and G's
You get married. Your wife leaves the house after you fight. Your neighbor hears the fight. You say " I will kill you if you leave". Days later, your wife is found dead, partially buried. She has been bludgeoned to death. The neighbor sees it on the news, calls the police, and tells them what he heard. Cops find a baseball bat in your truck bed and a shovel. They arrest you for murder. You go on trial. The neighbor didnt see your wife had left after the argument, leaving you in the house. You helped your father dig up a broken water line with the shovel. You play softball on the weekends.
They convict you of murder based on circumstantial evidence
Yet the differences are still noticeable.
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No, because 1st degree murder and voluntary manslaughter both require intent. Criminally negligent homicide wasn't an option.
If I leave a child in a hot car for hours, I can be convicted of voluntary manslaughter. My intent was to leave the child in the car, but not to kill it.
Let's say Casey duct taped the girl's mouth shut to get her to stop whining, and the girl suffocated. Casey didn't intend to kill the girl, but she did intend to commit the act that resulted in the death. Voluntary manslaughter.
I suppose Googling chloroform wasn't premeditated & the duct tape was an accident & the shovel was to plant a tree. Must have been old chicken mcnuggets stinking up the car.
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It's circumstantial. You can't tie it all together when you can't prove how or when the victim died. There might have been enough to get her with a preponderance of the evidence standard, but it wasn't even close to proving it beyond a reasonable doubt. And, that wasn't the discussion in the post you quoted.
That is absolutely incorrect. Voluntary manslaughter is the intentional killing of someone without premeditation. The difference between voluntary manslaughter and 2nd degree murder is that there is a level of provocation needed to knock down the intentional killing from 2nd degree to voluntary manslaughter. What you are describing might fit into involuntary manslaughter or reckless homicide or criminally negligent homicide.
My brain hasn't come back from vacation. I meant to put "involuntary" in the first example.
The duct tape example is totally voluntary. The child provoked the mother into committing an act that could very reasonably lead to the child's death. It was not done out of ignorance or neglect, but out of anger/frustration/annoyance.
That makes more sense now. And, you're correct about the duct tape. If they could have proven that she did that out of anger/frustration, etc., it probably rises above voluntary manslaughter to Secondary degree murder. A child doing something would not constitute adequate provocation for the lower charge of voluntary manslaughter. However, there just simply wasn't enough to link her to it.
I would agree that a child's actions wouldn't typically inspire a "crime of passion" or whatever you want to call it. I'm simply saying that the jury had that option.
And I think her actions lead to the very obvious conclusion that she knew her child was dead. And if she knew the child was dead, then she had to have some sort of connection to the death, even if it wasn't by her hand. It's very difficult for me to find any reasonable doubt that would suggest this was an accident.
I feel like the defense's MO was to paint the entire family as a bunch of nutcases, clouding the death of the child with a bunch of inane crap. I still cannot figure out what creating the grandfather's affair was supposed to prove. But then again, it worked.