Daniel Penny found not guilty
(twitter.com)
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Actually "not guilty" or "not guilty of a specific charge but they'll try again with another dozen different charges of the n-th degree" which they've been doing over the last few days?
I don't think so, the judge dropped the greater charge to try to get the juror to find him guilty of the lesser charge, and that didn't work.
Which is an indication that you've totally fucked up your trial. You send an M1 charge to the jury and they deadlock. You send a lesser charge and they acquit.
They're either exceptionally confused or the process was corrupted. The judge should feel deep shame over this result.
He should, but it sounds like he was hunting for a conviction.
In this case their fuck-fuck games backfired on them. If they had left the jury deadlocked it would be a mistrial and they could try again.
By dismissing the murder charge it's over. They can appeal the acquittal of the other charges, but they lost their chance at the murder conviction.
I don't understand the criminally negligent homicide charge at all.
That's like when you fuck up so badly doing something otherwise safe that you kill someone. Like, say, you leave your car in neutral without the parking brake and it rolls down a hill and runs over someone. That's potentially criminal negligence.
Two people fighting and one of them dies is the very definition of "involuntary manslaughter." You did something potentially dangerous and someone actually died because of it. If you're restraining someone and they (don't, but we'll pretend that Neeley did) die, it doesn't even make sense to accuse him of being "negligent." What did he "neglect" to do during the struggle? Ask for his consent?
So in this case, it actually makes sense to me that they could deadlock on manslaughter but dismiss criminal negligence because the negligence charge makes no sense whatsoever.
Like holding someone down on the floor until the cops arrive? The point is, whatever facts lead you to dismiss this, must necessarily lead you to dismiss the larger charge. The subtlety is the prosecution is not allowed to present two different theories but they can present two different charges.
So the jury is confused or they felt the Allen charge was annoying and someone changed their mind.
The dindu was alive after Penny released him. He died of a drug OD later.
In addition to Ant's comments, this is criminal charges. Civil charges have a much lower standard of evidence and much higher level of biases, there's tons of cases where someone is found not guilty in a court of law, but then gets fucked for millions of dollars in a secondary civil court for financial damages caused by the death they're innocent of.
Ne bis in idem doesn't apply in the United States: after a failed state prosecution, you can still bring federal charges.
The feds were at the ready with the Chauvin case to barge in and re-try him in case the jury got airs of refusing the intimidation directed at it.
In this case, I don't think it's going to happen. Penny has much better PR than Chauvin.
That’s not correct, it’s explicitly banned by the Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause. However, under the separate sovereigns doctrine, separate state and federal prosecutions are not prohibited because each is allowed to try a person.
Also there is such a thing as judicial harassment. That's not the term, but it's a long the same lines as malicious prosecution or vexatious litigation. The lawfare conducted against Trump only happened because 1) it's Trump and 2) because they were filed in different jurisdictions by different prosecutors. Had they been one prosecutor doing this to him half a dozen times they'd be thrown out by a judge before a trial even commenced.
The meme term is lawfare, but yes the trump cases were all kept at state level and obviously coordinated from the top down (Biden and his masters). The lengths they went to get as far as they did should frighten anyone paying attention. One involved changing laws just to squeeze a charge past the statute of limitations.