Suicide Train

Jackie Mason | January 27, 2005
[hidden by request]

Lori Lancaster | January 27, 2005
[hidden by request]

Anna Gregoline | January 27, 2005
Amazing, huh? I always wondered about people parking their cars in front of trains. Uh, get out and stand in front of it?

It's a really cruel thing to do to the driver in that instance though.

It should be involuntary manslaughter.

Mike Eberhart | January 27, 2005
11 counts of murder so far. This is one time that I think he shouldn't get the death penalty because that's what he wants. Making him live the rest of his life in prison would be more torture for him than killing him.

Mike Eberhart | January 27, 2005
It wasn't involuntary though. He knew what he was doing. He should get murder for sure.

Jackie Mason | January 27, 2005
[hidden by request]

Lori Lancaster | January 27, 2005
[hidden by request]

Anna Gregoline | January 27, 2005
It has to be involuntary manslaughter, or something like that, doesn't it? I mean, I can see how they could try and make a case for this, but a drunk driver isn't even charged with murder - I fail to see how this guy could be.

It's not just that people who are trying to kill themselves might not be thinking about others - they might not be thinking clearly at all. Combine that with the fact that this guy was on drugs - well, I don't think we can say he planned for anyone to get hurt. It WAS a stupid thing to do, but that's pretty obvious.

He also might not have had any understanding of trains - if the locomotive is pushing, like in this instance, the passenger cars hit first - derailing the train. If the locomotive was first, the SUV probably would have been tossed aside like a piece of paper. But who knows.

Unrelated gruesome: I just read a story about a guy who went behind a movie theatre, tied a rope around his neck and the other end to a pole, and got in his car and floored it. Some kids found his head later that night. YUCK!

Kris Weberg | January 28, 2005
Well, I suppose it's not like he'll try to avoiud the death penalty if he's charged with murder.....

Anna Gregoline | January 29, 2005
Our justice system has a history of not executing people who want to be executed.

Kris Weberg | January 29, 2005
"Our justice system" has a history of being none of the three.

Anna Gregoline | January 29, 2005
Of those three words? I certainly think it's a system. Not a good one, but definitely a system.

Kris Weberg | January 29, 2005
Not in some places. Texas, for instance.

Anna Gregoline | January 30, 2005
I'll still quibble with you on that one. It seems a pretty efficient electric chair system, for example.

Kris Weberg | January 30, 2005
Yes, plenty of people are executed in Texas, but the process for getting them there is erratic. That's the whole idea of arguing for a new trial -- it's a claim that the system didn't produce self-consistent results due to an anomalous or damaging factor that skewed the outcome of the original trial. If a defense attorney sleeps through your murder trial and doesn't sleep through another guy's murder trial, that's hardly systematic. Texas has also been rather strange in regards to accepting/not accepting DNA evidence for appeals...in some cases it works, in others, the appeals courts there don't want to overturn convictions.

Though if you want a genuinely corrupt system, I suggest you look to Louisiana, where the police actually ended up under direct Federal oversight because even Internal Affairs and the District Attorney couldn't be trusted to investigate charges.

Anna Gregoline | January 30, 2005
Sigh, Kris. It's still a system. You're always trying to get way deep.

Kris Weberg | January 30, 2005
I'm just thinking of it like Apocalypse Now:

Col. Kurtz: And you, Willard, do you think my methods are insane?
Col. Willard: I don't see...any method at all, sir.

Anna Gregoline | January 30, 2005
Whatever. I should know better than to defy the thesis-style statements of a grad student.

Kris Weberg | January 31, 2005
Well, so much for defusing it with an attempt at a joke. Consider me gone from this thread.

Anna Gregoline | January 31, 2005
And here I thought I could razz you cause I'm a friend in real life! Shows what I know.

Kris Weberg | January 31, 2005
Ah. Yet another unpleasant case in which tone of voice just doesn't come through properly online.

My apologies.