this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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I've understood it as:
First degree murder is intended and premeditated.
Second degree murder is intended but not planned ahead.
Third degree murder is when harm was intended but not death.
Manslaughter is an accident but one you should have known better and avoided.
Not that I'm disagreeing that those standards could be applied in accidental cases depending on the stupidity and predictability of the accident.
Sorry you got downvoted, this is valid.
What I’ve described is the law school crash course version. (I was a public defender for 4 years)
What you described is the common lay person version.
I don’t like using the premeditation language because premeditation can be less than a second. The lay understanding is that premeditation needs to be actual planning, like a heist. That is not the case.
So first and second degree are better separated through analyzing how much intentionality there was in the murder. Mens Rea, or mental state, is an important concept in criminal law.
You are correct that third degree can be intent to harm but went too far and actually killed the person. I never saw that version of third degree because it’s nearly impossible to prove that you only meant to batter/assault someone when they are dead because you beat them. Of course you give the jury the option for it, but most people will just think you meant to kill them.
Manslaughter is more than a mere accident. It’s a reasonably foreseeable accident. It sounds like I’m splitting hairs, but it is nuanced. If you slip and fall into a person and they fall in front of a train and get splattered, that’s probably not manslaughter. If you playfully push a person and they slip and fall out a window to their death, that’s pretty likely to be manslaughter, maybe more.
As a disclaimer these things do vary by state and country. I’m just explaining some things that are typical of these categories.
I don't mind downvotes, I just take them as someone didn't like what I said but dismiss them without any further engagement, though I appreciate your sentiment as well as the content of the comments.
I've found it to be an effective way of learning or gaining a better understanding to state the way I see something when it doesn't agree with the way someone else explains something. I just learned that mayonnaise can be made from egg yolks in addition to whites after making a similar comment to see if they had mistakenly said "yolk" instead of "white".
So thanks for the info and the willingness to explore it a bit more in the context I added!