That goes into the purposely/knowingly/recklessly thing. (But not negligently -- for that you only have to prove they should have known.)

One example of negligent homicide is not taking care of your baby to the point that it dies. Negligent homicide is sometimes grouped in with involuntary manslaughter as well. Lots of negligent homicide charges here as well.

In this country you don't have to help anybody if they're in trouble. You could sit there and watch as someone was murdered and you would not get into legal trouble for it.* Prosecution would have to prove they had an active role and had forced or coerced him into doing it. Simply saying "Do it!" does not count(may be different in his state, but I doubt it).

* Some exceptions apply

Such as GameFAQs and 4Chan? The Internet can really reveal humanity's darkside due to the annonymous nature of it to say the least...

I'm familiar with negligent homicide, but like involuntary (and sometimes voluntary) manslaughter it's not considered murder in most (any?) places. The penalty for criminally negligent homicide would be quite a bit less severe.



This is exactly right (with the main exception I'm aware of being in cases where there's an established legal duty to act), and it's why they'd have to prove an act or omission causing death if they wanted to get the folks in the chat room for any kind of homicide.

Negligent homicide and manslaughter is recognized as murder. It's given a lesser punishment because the circumstances surrounding that murder are less serious. The acts are the same, it's the intentions that differentiate them.

Yeah. It'd be pretty hard to even slap em with a negligence suit since it's not really in a chatroom participant's duty of care to prevent the deaths of the other chatters, much less were they a proximate cause.

Also, I think in California you can get 2nd degree murder if you do something that's massively and absurdly in disregard of human life (gross negligence); i.e. you not caring about killing someone to the extent where anyone would have reasonably recognize that your action WOULD kill someone constitutes sufficient mens rea.


Er I dunno, as far as I know barring the circumstance I just mentioned, if there's no mens rea (i.e. malice/forethought/intent to kill) involuntary manslaughter is legally distinct from any type of murder (and if there was then it wouldn't be involuntary manslaughter)


Correct me if I'm wrong, though ... I readily admit I'm not very learned in law past intro courses el oh el.

Mens rea = intention. I just refuse to use latin terms.

In either premeditated murder or involuntary manslaughter, someone was killed. The "actus reus" is the same. What makes the crimes different is the mens rea. We punish people not just for the crime that was committed, but for how the crime happened as well.

It's occurred to me since my last post that this is probably an equally legitimate way of handling homicide. You could call every homicide a murder and reduce punishment for lower levels of culpability. This has the disadvantage of weakening the signaling function of calling an offense "murder" -- which is probably one reason it's not the way the Model Penal Code, Texas Penal Code, or common law deal with homicide -- but I can't say that no one does it or that it couldn't be done.

(Small exception for the Texas Penal Code: Where you'd normally have voluntary manslaughter, you instead have murder reduced to a second degree felony.)