Your freind drives drunk, you get charged with manslaughter

It's stories like this that make me want to go live alone in the mountains.

Unless they can prove that Dude B specifically assumed legal responsibility for supervising Dude A, I don't see how a conviction could hold up on appeal. I'm surprised that the case hasn't already been dismissed, but there's a lot of political pressure on judges and prosecutors to pursue drunk driving cases.

Here's another story on this
http://news.findlaw.com/ap/l/0000/7...0224500_01.html

Apparently the police handed Dude A his car keys and told him how to get back to his car. Seems to me the police were saying go ahead and drive away. Also his blood alcohol level was 0.26 at the time of the wreck which was less than one hour after he was dropped off. 0.08 is the legal limit. I'm willing to bet that he was still trashed when he was released.

only in New Jersey

Here's another take on the story: www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/08/ctv.powell.trial/

According to this version, Dude A was still drunk when the police released him, and Dude B specifically agreed to take Dude A home. Instead, Dude B took Dude A to his car, knowing that Dude A was still drunk. This clarifies things a bit.

What I find most amazing is that the same fairly simple story was reported in two completely different ways even though both reports are linked together on CNN's web site. The first report, by a CNN "Legal Editor", is incomplete and confusing, both from a factual and a legal standpoint. The guy should be fired on the spot. The other report is much more straightforward and clear.

Yet a third version of the same story, this time revealing that the police gave the men directions to Dude A's car, with no suggestion that Dude B agreed to take Dude A home (the second report) or that Dude A drank more after getting back in his car (the first report).

This does not exactly enhance my faith in reporters. This is not such a complicated story that the basic factual background can't be reported in a consistent and straightforward fashion.

That story is much better. It seem to me that the prosecutors are graping for headlines rather than seeing justice served. If Dude A had lived Dude B would probably never have been charged with anything. It still seems strange to me that the police released him 0.26 is really wasted. I've know people who were picked up fro public drunkedness that were held until they sobered up.

Dude C (who looks remarkably like me -- handsome devil!) looks, points and LAUGHS at Loser-Dudes A and B, who are so f*cking stupid as to numb the intellect by their mere presence.

Sounds like Dude A and Dude B are a couple of losers. How about we rejoice that they're immersed in all of this sh*t, and hope that it inspires others to change their behavior?

Well, here in the U.S., if you facilitate someone's drunk driving, you can be legally responsible. There are many cases of people handing drunks their keys, and of bartenders being jailed for not taking away a drunk's keys! (I happen to find those laws to be excessive, but oh well.)

tooki

Some more candidates for the Darwin award!! This is another example of how we're being held less responsible for our own actions, by blaming somebody else for the results! The moral of the story is simple; don't hang around losers who are drunks!

Yes you can be legally responsible for contributing to somebody else's drunken stupidity. But this usually takes the for of civil liability not criminal. In other words the bar gets sued for serving too much. Also the laws are geared toward those supplying the booze.

What is unusual about this case that Dude B did not provided alcohol to Dude A. Granted, that dropping him off at his car was a dumb ass move. Charging Dude B with manslaughter is over the top. Dude A almost certainly had to of had more to drink (assuming the 0.26 BAL in the AP story is correct) otherwise Dude A would have been severly stumbling if not being carried out of the police station. Not to mention he would have likely been unconcious when originally brought in.

Dude C should be concerned. If a conviction holds up, Dude C could easily acquire a criminal record for just giving a friend a beer.

Shouldn't the police be lible as well for letting them go?

I don't think that .26 BAL is correct... if I recall right, you would be dead w/ that much liquor in your bloodstream. (don't quote me on that, i barely scraped by in bio! )

http://www.habitsmart.com/bal.html

The link above shows the affects of different blood alcohol level. At about 0.4 people start dying.

Montezuma is correct. In most states, a bar (and in some cases an individual) can be subject to civil (not criminal) liability for providing alcohol to an adult who is already visibly intoxicated, if that person then goes out and injures someone else. But there is normally no liability for failing to prevent another adult from driving, even if you know that they're drunk. That would require you to use physical force (in which case you could be liable to the drunkard for assault and battery!).

The prosecution's theory in this case (although it's hard to tell from the lousy reporting) appears to be that Dude B didn't merely fail to prevent Dude A from driving, but that Dude B actually facilitated Dude A by taking him to his car, and was therefore an accomplice. If Dude A was drunk at the time, I can see an argument being made for it, the problem is where do you draw the line? At what point does mere inaction become facilitation? Why weren't the police, who released the guy with his car keys, also charged? What about the guy who sells gas to Dude A?

The way i read it was that Dude A was released into the recognizance of Dude B, which DOES make Dude B responsible for the whereabouts of Dude A. Seems he "signed" for him. I had to do this once to bail out a drunken girlfriend in time to get her to a gig. (suffice it to say she did not sing well that night) The police made it perfectly clear that I was responsible for her actions until the charges were settled.

Ah, the good old days.

CV

How responsible is it for the cops to release one drunk dude into the supervision of another?

Depending on state law, the police may have sovereign immunity to civil suit.

Lame that seems like passing the buck. Here we don't want this druken freak you take him but you better watch him or we will arrest ya!

The common law principal is that citizens can not sue the sovereign (i.e. the state) for its acts or the official acts of its agents. So you can't sue the police department or individual officers if they are acting within the scope of their employment.

There are all kinds of exceptions, and I have absolutely no idea of the state of New Jersey law in this or any other area. But I believe this is the starting point.

I should add that perhaps Zig Zag might comment. I'm sure he knows more about this than I do.

If dude A was released while he was still intoxicated, then dude B should have taken him straight home. But is he legally obligated to do so? Should the police who released him be obligated to at least give him a verbal or, better-yet, written warning that he is to be taken straight home?

The problem there is what about the jail? Should they have been liable to hold him in a "drunk tank" over-night until he was sober before releasing him? Should they have told dude B that he MUST take his friend straight home?

Like ringo said; "Only in New Jersey "

I really think there's a few mitigating circumstances which determine whether dude B should even be liable at all. If the police said "Look, your friend is still drunk, you MUST take him straight home" then had him sign a release, given him a copy and he STILL dropped him at his car, then dude B is definitely at fault.

Another interresting thing is they called dude B in the middle of the night to pick up his friend. How would dude B know how long the police had been holding him? Were they holding him long enough to sober-up?

This case sounds like a huge mess, I'm not sure where I stand.

MikeM32

You're generally correct about governmental immunity from civil suits, although it depends on the state. In my state, you have to prove gross negligence, as opposed to ordinary negligence, in order to hold a governmental official liable in a civil suit.

However, the case under discussion is a criminal prosecution. I've never heard of a police dept. being criminally prosecuted in a drunk driving case the way Dude B is being prosecuted.

If Dude B agreed to accept responsibility for Dude A when he picked him up, then perhaps they can make a case against him (I've never done any criminal law so I don't know what legal arrangements are made when prisoners are released). I'd still like to get a straightforward report on the facts, or at least on each side's theory. We've got three reports, all with conflicting information.

Interesting case, though.

Sorry I should have been more clear. I realize that the case at hand is a criminal case, but I assumed that when shmerek used the word "liable" he (she?) was suggesting that a civil suit should come out of this as well.

I haven't taken crim law yet. I'm supposed to do that in the spring and I have a nasty feeling I'll be hearing about this case.

Not guilty of manslaughter. Deadlocked on other charges.

http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/09/n...rial/index.html


edit:
Here's yet another story:

just go to http://www.nj.com I can't get a direct link to work

Yeah - it presents an interesting fact situation. But you'll hear about much crazier cases, especially at final exam time.

I defended restaurants and bars against civil dram shop claims for many years. In one case, a woman went with her boyfriend to a bar owned by her parents. She helped out behind the bar (but not for pay) and got drunk. She also played pool with another guy and served him. He left and went somewhere else. She later left with her boyfriend, they got in an argument, and she started walking back to the bar in the dark, wearing black clothing. As she was walking, the same guy she had played pool with and served beer to a couple of hours earlier came along in his pickup truck and accidentally ran her over, killing her. His right headlight was out. The woman's surviving daughter had to sue her own grandparents and her own deceased mother's estate in order to recover under the dram shop law. Yet the same grandparents were now her legal guardians, so they would be responsible for managing the very money that they might have to pay to her.

It presents a great set of issues for a tort law exam (or a bad episode of "The Practice"): Was the women an employee, a customer, or both? Are her parents liable for her intoxication if she serves herself? Was the stranger visibly intoxicated when she served him? Was the driver at fault, or the pedestrian? Was the proximate cause of the accident: (a) the driver's alleged intoxication, (b) the woman's intoxication, (c) the driver's bad headlight, (d) the woman's dark clothing, (e) the driver driving on the shoulder, (f) the woman walking in the roadway, or some combination? Would the grandparents shade their testimony to protect their own assets, or would they make things look worse in order to help their granddaughter recover more of their own insurance coverage? It was the most ironic and convoluted set of facts that I ever saw.

Then there were the two best friends who bought each other rounds and left a bar. Dude A didn't feel like driving and gave his keys to Dude B. Dude B promptly gunned the car in the parking lot and accidently ran over his best friend, killing him. Should the bar be liable to Dude A's surviving family if Dude A knowingly bought rounds for Dude B and handed him his keys? If Dude A is killed by his own car, who's car insurance applies? Etc.

As KarlG said, Darwinism at work.

Thankfully, torts was last semester so I can forget about that a bit until it's time for the bar. I had the world's worst torts professor. For our final exam, she gave us an outline of a problem on products liability -- a topic we had not studied at all. Then she had us construct our own fact pattern to illustrate it and answer the fact pattern in the usual way.

We all freaked. Absolutely nobody was prepared to take that kind of exam and I was conviced afterwards that I had flunked. To my complete shock I got an A, but I can't wait to see her feedback to see what her rationale for that bizarreness was.

Sounds interesting - I did a lot of products liability work as well.

I knew the law backwards and forwards but never quite got the hang of writing exam essays. But then I passed three different bar exams on the Multistate, while our No. 1 student failed. Everyone has different aptitudes.

Cool!

I don't know if I will ever figure out law school exams. I'm begining to suspect they really do grade them by which step they land on. Such a shame everyone thinks they are so important.

I was always told that the essay exams were about issue-spotting, which I thought I could do as well as anyone, but I still never graded well on them. Either I couldn't spot issues as well as I thought, or my writing style didn't suit the professors. I never figured it out.

I don't think very highly of traditional legal education - I think that 3 years of lectures and exams is anachronistic at best. But the academic establishment is as self-perpetuating as it gets. But don't listen to me - enjoy the privileges and rewards of attending school as much as you can.

One major fault in the case here is that in New Jersey, there is no good samaritan law. You are not legally required to step and prevent a crime from taken place. And if a good samaritan law was in place, what happens if you have to use force to stop a crime? Are you then guilty of assault?

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who is drunk knows he is getting intoxicated from the alcohol, and the condition he will be in after drinking. Unless a drink was forced down his throat, he should be liable for his actions while under the influence

I think you are misunderstanding Good Samaritan laws. IFAIK, what are generically known as Good Samaritan laws don't obligate you to do anything. What they are is a shield to civil tort liability (not criminal law) if you voluntarily involve yourself by trying to rescue somebody.

The traditional common law principal is that uninvolved third parties have no duty to intervene if they see someone in trouble unless there is already some special relationship between the parties that creates a duty. So if you see some perfect stranger drowning, you can't be sued if you let them drown. In contrast, if you involve yourself by trying to rescue them and botch it, you can be sued. That sets up a perverse incentive not to be a Good Samaritan.

Good Samaritan laws try to neutralize that incentive by providing a limited shield to liability, but AFAIK, many of them only apply to off-duty medical personnel. They act as a shield to malpractice for failed resuscitations and so forth.

I seem to remember there is an exception in Vermont that does require action by third parties. But remember, I am not a lawyer in Vermont or anywhere else!

Too late! I already have a bad impression of law school and the clique that runs it. All I'm doing is going through the motions and attempting (often unsucessfully) to bite my tongue.

I'll do what is expected of me. For example, this fall I will be starting on a journal. But I don't feel any obligation to pretend that law school isn't anything but a game and mostly for the benefit of the law school and the desire of employers to have a simple way to rank their applicants.

I thought that was made up just for the last episode of Sienfield.

The problem that I have the case is that is seems to have been brought about by social or emotional reactions to method by which Dude A caused the deaths and injuries rather than being based on existing law or legal principles. Driving drunk is not the only way to commit manslaughter or vehicular homicide. Would these charges have been brought against Dude B if the same deaths and injuries had occured under different circumstances? Say for example Dude B loaned his motorcycle to Dude A knowing that Dude A likes to ride fast and dangerously. Then Dude A has a wreck. Or lets say Dude A has a known tendancy to get into fights after drinking but Dude B takes him to a bar anyways and the same deaths and injuries result. Unless you are going to give everyone breathalyzer kits (how else are you going to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that somone knew another person was not fit to drive) and the power to arrest or detain others I just don't see how you can make a crime out of the actions of Dude B.

Well, it was mentioned in my case book (the VT statute, not Sienfeld).

A fair assessment. I went to work for a guy who never even asked me what school I went to, much less my class rank. I ended up with him for 15 years.

In NJ if you drive drunk and hit someone, even if you paralize the person, as long as they don't die, and it's your first offense, you will be back on the road in 30 days (or less in some cases if you sweet talk the judge). Happens all the time here. It's just life.


In many civilized countries, you lose your license for a year just for driving drunk, in some you lose it for several years or life.

Others offer the death penalty.


I want to move there.


All my friends drive drunk constantly just for kicks. They know all that happens is they get a fine. Even if someone dies as a result, they most likely won't be prosicuted.

Kind of sick.


Also note that NJ has the most F***ed up laws of all states. Only here has the law actually been modified to create a legal avenue to charge someone who attempted suicide with attempted manslaughter. Seems like some lawmakers need to get a clue and think about what they devote their time to.

There's a lot of pressure on prosecutors and judges to bring the hammer down on drunk driving, and this is one result. I appreciate the sentiment but it could have some unintended consequences.

Just to be clear, they aren't trying to make new law, they're trying to apply existing law (the manslaughter statute) in a creative way - to someone who facilitated a drunk driver rather than the driver himself (who is dead). However, if they succeed, it will encourage other prosecutors to pursue such cases, so in that sense it would be a precedent.

When they tried Charles Manson, they had to apply existing criminal statutes in a creative way, because Manson himself never actually killed anybody and wasn't even at the scene of the crimes. They had to argue that his psychological influence on the others made him an accomplice or co-conspirator. They weren't really sure if they could nail him or not.

It's true that the law traditionally provides that one adult is not legally responsible for the independent actions of another adult. But there's a point at which one becomes an accomplice even if one doesn't directly participate in the criminal act. If you hand an arsonist a match (or provide him with gasoline), you can be convicted as an accomplice if you had reason to know that the arsonist was going to use it to start a fire. This case is a lot fuzzier, which is why we have juries - they had to make a judgment as to whether Dude B was culpable within the scope of the existing statute.

I sure wish we had a better account of the underlying facts - the news reports are very ambiguous.

I'm not sure where you got that information. If you did injure someone the penalties would be even stiffer. The only way in hell you'll get off on 30 days suspension is if you refuse to take a breath test and/or have a damn good DUI lawyer.

6 months suspension = 1st offense
2 year suspension = 2nd offesne
10 year suspension = 3rd offesne

These don't even include the fines, insurance surcharges, mandatory in or outpatient rehabilitation (on your dime not the states).

And those are just for getting cought, nevermind if you actually do injure, or kill someone.

Here's some more about the NJ DUI penalties from NJ Motor Vehicle Services (scroll down):
NJ DUI Penalty Information

MikeM32

You may both be right. The penalties for DUI are stiff, but a DWI lawyer will often get the charges reduced to a simple moving violation or some such. They know that the prosecutors and courts don't have time to take every case DWI case to trial.

Of course, if you kill or seriously injure someone, it's harder to make a deal. MADD is more likely to get involved in those cases, and the prosecutors and judges don't like to offend MADD. Oddly enough, there's no countervailing group lobbying on behalf of drunk drivers.

Results from the trial originally posted about:
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index...70612245676.xml



Yes you could hire a lawyer. The DUI lawyers make a killing however. For many it's simply not worth fighting it.

MikeM32

Thanks for the link. Finally a reporter who knows what he's doing. Although we still don't know what condition Dude A was allegedly in at the time Dude B dropped him off at his car. The implication is that he was still hammered.

Interesting that, as a result of this case, they passed a law requiring "Dude B's" to accept legal responsibility for "Dude A's" when they get them out of jail. A lot of "Dude A's" will be sitting in jail a lot longer - who's going to want to accept legal responsibility for them?

You know, I seriously wonder whether or not this would've happened if Party A had survived the crash. If that were the case, Person A could've been sent to trial on charges of drunk driving, manslaughter, etc., and been sent to jail, and the families of the victim can go home feeling that all's well and that their missing son has been avenged. However, in this case, the culprit was killed by his own stupidity, and thus could not be put to justice. As is human nature, it's unsatisfying to see a villian escape, even through death, from your vengeance, thus this charge arises, or at least is brought to the forefront. It's likely this issue would'nt have arisen at all had this not been a fatal accident for both parties.

And how many cases has that been applied? I can't think of one that has gotten more than 30 days. It's the sad truth.

Just like the "strict environmental laws" that Whitman passed in NJ.... a whole bunch of BS that is not enforced causing more problems than there were before.

This was a great debate. Frankly I think if Dude A wasn't drunk, and left, and Dude B was asked by Dude A to bail him, why should Dude B be held responsible?

Welcome back Mike.. It's good to see you posting again, I hope all is going well with you!

euch

I would be checking the dates - another thread pulled from the archive....

I've always been told, at least here in NJ, when you bail someone out, you take liability that they are no longer a threat for whatever action/problem put them in jail.

Not sure how well that's been tested in the courts, but that's been the common assumed stance on the issue for at least my entire life.



I've always told friends that they can go do what they want, but never call me to bail them out. I just won't do it. If your dumb enough to get your butt in jail, you can figure it out. Unless your imediate family, no dice. Not even if I know your good for the cash it's not about money.

Assault, drunk driving, whatever. Don't matter.

None of my pals have ever even tried calling. Very few have been arrested though. So that's a good sign. Lets hope it stays like that.

Sorry for the false alarm but that's an old post. I wonder how Mike's doing myself

I was going to ask :|

Ohhh man... I didn't look at the date, that's too bad. It would have been cool if he just posted out of the blue like that, not announcing he was back, just getting back in. Oh, well, I hope he's doing fine.