Three guys enter a home with intent to rob it. Homeowner shoots two of the robbers in the back. Third robber flees the scene. Who gets charged with murder?
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17 thoughts on “Who’s the murderer?”
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Three guys enter a home with intent to rob it. Homeowner shoots two of the robbers in the back. Third robber flees the scene. Who gets charged with murder?
Read this.
Comments are closed.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
In Virginia, the charge would be Felony Murder.
When a death occurs in the commission of a felony, that charge applies, whether the death that of the victim, an accomplice, or an unfortunate passer by.
Who else would you hold responsible for those deaths? The homeowner who successfully defended his castle?
The charge is entirely appropriate. It is truly sad that people are trying to confuse a straightforward legal issue by injecting race into it. Hughes committed a violent crime that resulted in deaths that would not have occurred otherwise. What is so complicated?
Yes, felony murder. Not the same thing as murder. Essentially, it imposes the same kind of penalties associated with murder for criminal behavior that is likely to result in murder.
A decent summary of the felony murder doctrine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder
I am not aware of any Virginia case that adopts the broad notion of felony murder suggested by the dentist. I am not at my office at the moment, or I could give you a more authoritative answer.
I am fairly certain that more states reject that broad definition of felony murder than use it.
RD – what do you mean “not the same thing as murder”? The link you provided says:
That’s what happens when someone cites to Wikipedia. Check it in five minutes and it will say that felony murder is when someone murders a Disney cartoon character.
Felony murder cannot be a capital offense without some bizarre statutory intervention because capital murder requires deliberation or premeditation and even then, in Virginia, must be connected to some other aggravating factor (like the victim is a police officer or under 14, the murder occurs during a drug transaction, or occurs in a penal facility by an inmate). Felony murder can, however, be first-degree murder; but first-degree murder is not capital murder.
The situation is more complex in Virginia, because Virginia distinguishes between felony murder–which is either intentional or accidental homicide during an arson, rape, forcible sodomy, object sexual penetration, robbery, burglary, or abduction–and felony homicide–which is accidental and not intentional, and occurs during the commission of any other felony.
Virginia’s felony murder charge requires that the homicide result from an act calculated to advance the underlying felony, so a homicide of the type in the article you cite could only be felony homicide here. (The death of the two robbers was probably not calculate by the surviving robber to advance the robbery.)
Oh, but the dentist did get this part right, though: the purpose of felony murder culpability to is to assign culpability to the parties responsible for the underlying felony for all the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their felonious act. That a victim might forcibly resist the attempted perpetration of one of felonious act, resulting in the death of one of the felonious actors,* is objectively reasonably foreseeable, and the possibility of criminal culpability for a murder, even unintended by the felonious actors, is the cost of their doing business, not the cost of doing the business of being a victim.
That’s not to say that in a case like this one the victim couldn’t be charged with second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter. The use of deadly force in self-defense is a defense to criminal culpability for homicide in some cases, which now vary widely by jurisdiction. (Florida now has a very expansive statutory defense of self-defense.) In this case, where the robbers were shot in the back apparently in the act of flight, one could argue (as I believe Michael Herring in Richmond recently did after a Baskin-Robbins robbery) that there was no reasonable belief of imminent severe bodily injury giving the shooter a self-defense justification.
That type of prosection is very rare because juries are usually sympathetic to the victim anyway. (In the Richmond case, I’m under the impression that the grand jury declined to indict the shooter-defendant.) It’s also rare where, as here, there is a “guiltier” person at hand to blame–the surviving robber, who has felony murder culpability.
* By the way, if the victim had shot at the felonious actors, missed, and hit a bystander, the felons would in most cases be liable for that homicide as well.
I love Cory Chandler. I don’t necessarily want to *take* one of his lawschool classes, but I definitely would love to watch a few of them. My understanding of the law is that as a homeowner, you’re almost always going to be absolved of guilt in a shooting death that occurs during a home invasion because you don’t have the same responsibility to flee you might have if you were a bystander during a store robbery. Home Invasion is what CA police would call this, by the way — not a robbery. They didn’t enter the premises for a smash and grab, they confronted the residents and apparently beat one of them pretty badly.
So in general, I agree with Tabor’s interpretation, though I’d like to know more about how this scenario came to unfold. The object of a home invasion is usually not to obtain marijuana; the fact that they entered the premises, beat a specific occupant and demanded a narcotic indicates to me that the residents are NOT squeaky clean. The shooting itself is also kind of interesting; most people can’t hit *one* target, let alone shoot and kill two while under duress. The vast majority of gun homicides occur within a range of 12 feet because most shooters cannot hit a target outside that range under stress. This whole scenario is unusual, and it raises questions for me. If the residents were warehousing and/or dealing drugs, I would begin to think that they actually share some culpability from a moral standpoint. Whether they would be culpable legally, well, we have to ask Cory. I can’t find it on Wikipedia. 😉
By the way, while I agree with the general interpretation offered by the dentist, I disagree with his sentiment. As someone who has been at both ends of a weapon, I’m automatically distrustful of anyone who romanticizes a shooting death as “successfully defending the castle.”
(I should clarify that by “I agree with Tabor’s interpretation,” I mean I agree with his interpretation of the scenario in terms of who should be thought culpable more a moral standpoint. On legal matters I defer to Cory, until such time as we start talking about identifying cadavers by their dental records).
A few things…
cvillelaw,
Google up the case of former Bedford County Deputy Jason Saunders.
anonymous (get a name),
The owner of the home has a prescription for marijuana under California law. Too much assuming on your part I think.
In general I’m fine with this charge. The homeowner definitely should not be charged. Don’t break into a house and beat one resident into a permanently disabled state, and you don’t have to worry about getting shot by the homeowner or getting charged with murder. It’s just too bad that one of the thugs lived.
I didn’t expect that the homeowner would have been charged. I did think it was curious that the third robber got charged with this particular crime. But then, I’m a CPA, not a lawyer 😉
Actually, from the second sentence, I was expecting the homeowner to get charged. Two people shot in the back? Not your textbook instance of defense, is it?
I’m continually surprised (and disappointed) in the number of people who are willing to condone the use of deadly force to prevent a property crime. It’s just stuff.
(Acknowledging, of course, that it was a bit more than that here. But, as noted, I’m not getting the innocent party vibe from the victims here . . .).
As a student of the law, I am especially fond of the common law because it has been developed over hundreds of years and, in general, any changes get made over decades (if not centuries), not legislative sessions. So it’s very hard to argue that a particular rule has a disparate effect on any class.
That’s not the same with today’s statute-driven world, especially states like California, and, I fear, increasingly, Virginia, where we seem to pass a couple hundred bills a year altering the common law.
If Shannon Edmonds’ (the shooter) story is true, I agree that it is weird that California wants to charge anyone with murder. I suppose that is why some refer to California as a state of mind. Other than that, I can’t believe all the legalistic arguments. Put yourself in the shoes of the guy with the gun.
Your home has been invaded by three ruffians. One of your children is being hit on the head with a bat. You get your gun. What are you going to do with the gun? You are going to let the fact the people who beat your child are running stop you from shooting them? Not likely. From the description in this report, the intruders may even have had a shotgun. In any event, the two who died were shot with a hand gun. That suggest they were shot at close range. They had only just started running.
What I think is really at issue is whether Edmonds story is true. That I do not know. That is why we have juries.
Ruffians, you say?! Well, my good man, let us call the constable and be done with this unpleasant business at once!