Hillsborough - Justice

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 SuperDave84 wrote:

That's gross negligence manslaughter, and it carries a sentence of up to life imprisonment, like any form of manslaughter. The difference is that the penalty isn't mandatory. Whatever you call it, the label isn't really that important. What counts is the penalty.  I'll ask this: should anyone so charged of such an offence necessarily receive life sentences, without any possibility of a lesser sentence, if they are convicted? Whatever you think of their actions and culpability, to say that seems a step too far.

In the US it might be called "fourth degree murder", which is arguably incorrect; in the UK it is called gross negligence manslaughter. Both are forms of unjustified homicide.

Murder, by common definition, is the intentional ending of another person's life, with distinctions occasionally made (again, in the US, and not so much here or the UK) between cases where it was premeditated ("first degree"), like an assassination, not premeditated ("second degree"), like an overreaction in a bar fight where you deliberately stab someone in the neck with a broken glass, and, lower still, not premeditated but provoked or a crime of passion ("third degree"), like where you find someone sleeping with your wife and you murder them in a rage. Those are all killings with intention to take a life, or at least cause serious injury; that's why they're called murder.

Anything without intention to kill or cause serious injury isn't murder; that doesn't mean it isn't homicide and it doesn't mean it shouldn't be punished. Manslaughter is the usual term in the UK and here; it is still a very, very serious crime, carrying a potential sentence of up to life imprisonment, with the exception that that sentence isn't mandatory. The actions of the police in this case may well have been intentional; that doesn't mean that the killing was intentional.

It can be called many things, if proven, but it can't be called murder. It'll be for a jury to decide if they are guilty of manslaughter, but it's not murder. You give out about people using "literally" incorrectly, then you figuratively murder the definition of murder. It's not murder without some manner of intention. To use it otherwise is to do violence to the English language.

Fair enough. I've been lawyered.