If he was driving 40mph, it would be an accident. At 80mph, it's murder. He made the premeditated decision to kill when he threw everything he knew about driving safely out the window and put the pedal to the metal. It's that simple.
This wasn't a freeway where he was going 80 in a 75 zone. It was a normal road with intersections and many other road users going the speed limit or below. It's simply idiotic to drive 80 there, and it's very easy to accidentally kill someone when you're going that fast. (You have no time to react.)
Driver's Ed is 6 months of you being told this every single day. He knew it was dangerous. He did it anyway. He killed someone. That's murder.
(Personally, I think 40mph is way too high of a speed limit for roads like this. 20mph would be a much better. Car/pedestrian collisions are much more survivable at that speed, and cyclists can move in and out of traffic freely. But 80mph is just fucking insane.)
He is saying that murder is a stretch.
The reason it became murder is because he was found to be boasting about his speeding behavior online, i.e. it wasn't episodic or unintended. He meant to go fast, he planned to go fast, and an 18-year-old is an adult with adult responsibilities -- whether or not he is ready for them.
Knowingly engaging in behavior that risky — driving faster than any posted speed limit in the entire United States of America on residential streets is egregiously risky — and thereby causing someone's death is textbook murder.
EDIT: phrasing.
-shrug-
Not that I'd particularly mind if that was resolved in favour of providing reasonably long prison sentences to people who commit truly awful driving offences. But either way.
I, on the other hand, don't think its ridiculous that homicide is, in fact, an element of the offense of murder.
> If intent's what matters then you've got to be consistent in that regard.
Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
> Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
I suspect we might just have an irreconcilable difference of framework in that respect:
I view the purpose of law to be to minimise the maximise the public good while causing the minimum restriction of freedoms. That being inherently a balancing act, freedom/security, the exact value of which is responsible for a lot of the problems with the actual application of law.
In that framework whether someone's acts resulted in death is dramatically less important than whether they were likely to, and whether the person who did it is likely to do so again unless restrained. (That their acts actually did lead to the death is evidence in favour of that class of act being more likely to lead to deaths than it would be without that bit of evidence, so in that sense it matters.)
Beyond that, whether someone dies or not, the drink driver and the speeder who didn't kill anyone but committed equally dangerous offences - they're all guilty of murder in the sense that matters to me. To borrow the way of phrasing it from the Christians: They've all already killed people in their hearts. It's just luck that no-one's dead for them, and luck's not a property of people, it's a property of limited knowledge; you can't rely on it.
In so far as we have knowledge, under such a system, if you lock the guy who actually killed people up, the rest should be locked up too.