How much of a lowlife do you have to be to ransomware a Hospital?
If these people put 1/5 of the work towards a productive software product they would probably make 10x the money.
When the cops contacted them to tell them they had attacked a hospital, the ransomware people gave them the keys. The hospital has access to their data again.
Looks like even criminals have a conscience. Or maybe they figured if someone dies they might be an actual effort by the police to hunt them down and put them in jail for a decade or two so they better cooperate.
Yeah, we call that an accident. Just like hitting someone with your car can be an unintended consequence of driving.
> Then your defense is "I'm not a monster, of course I didn't purposely hit a pregnant woman."
The question of whether or not I'm a monster is irrelevant to the fact that hitting the pregnant woman was an accident.
Applying that to this incident seems barbaric. The "transferred intent" is stealing. Sure they're jerks, but don't make them out to be murderers. The fact that a woman died was an accident through and through.
The very worst case scenario they saw when they initiated their crime was that some data would be lost. The transferred intent is that the data of another organisation was going to be lost.
That a woman died was an accident.
Transferred intent is when a perpetrator intends to harm one victim but then "unintentionally" (quotes mine to point out it is in the defined legalese rather than "accident"). Yes, you can say they meant to steal, and not intentionally kill anyone. IANAL.
If you want to put it in legal scope though, it is involuntary manslaughter. You haven't convinced me to call it an "accident" by any means.
Look up any dictionary and I assure you that you'll find the definition fits this case perfectly.
Eg from the Oxford dictionary:
"An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury."
Death is unexpected when you hack a University server. Death was certainly unintentional in this case.
> Yeah, we call that an accident. Just like hitting someone with your car can be an unintended consequence of driving.
I would add to your statement above to make it fit the comparison to the actual incident a bit better:
> Yeah, we call that an accident. Just like hitting someone with your car can be an unintended consequence of driving a getaway car during a bank robbery.
I wouldn't use the word "accident" here. I would say someone "tragically" died when a criminal was driving away from the scene of a robbery. Of the 38,000 people who die in car "accidents" in the U.S. each year, if 30,000 of those were getaway cars or tied to criminal activity, and not just "accidents" I think there would be a different response to the scenario I just presented.
Accidental death benefits from the insurance industry exclude death caused by illegal activities, but I think this means by the person committing the illegal acts, so maybe not such a good example. I don't know.
If someone chokes someone, so that they can render them unconscious to rob them or arrest them, and the choked out person dies during the process, would you use the word "accident" in reporting the incident?
If this university/hospital hack was committed by completely naive hackers, they were still committing intentional harm to a business that affects the employees and others doing business with them. It doesn't take much imagination to figure that by using ransomware in this incident, you may affect people's lives negatively without the actual death that occurred. They might have to lay off a worker or two to cover the loss, not buy essential equipment for the university or hospital that year or more, etc.
I'll leave off here, and say you had a "convincing" argument from a concise dictionary definition, but I wouldn't sling that word so nonchalantly in applying it to this woman's death. Perhaps I misread the tone of your "Yeah, we call that and accident.", but who's we?
Germany is not a common law jurisdiction. If you use legal arguments, at least use ones that are applicable.