>>> Max Sawicky <sawicky at epinet.org> 03/10/99 03:46PM >>>
> Charles: The main goof up is to think that the guys who run many
> unsafe factories are innocent compared with random murderers. The
It's not the main goof up because nobody here has made that goof. You did not see the word 'innocent' married to 'unsafe factories' in my posts. ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
CB: You referred to it being in some sense goofy to compare random subway shooting to random factory deaths. It is not goofy to compare many factory owners to murderers if one uses the logic that one is presumed to intend the necessary and foreseeable consequences of one's actions , as I think it was Mr. Justice (?) Powell formulated it for the recklessness mental element standard in torts. Reckless disregard for human life is a mens rea standard for second degree murder in the current law. SOME factory killings can be logically compared to subway killings. Your argument that none can is not true, is goofy, whatever.
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> deaths of people who die from many factory decisions are
> foreseeable and random. As one of the Supreme Court Justices (Powell I think)
> formulated it in tort law, one intends the forseeable and
> necessary consequences of one's actions. The same principle
Legal simpleton that I am, I know that a tort is not the same as a capital crime.
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CB: Attorney that I am, I know that the U.S. legal system doesn't equate them because the logic would lead to too many capitalists being put in jail, not because they are not logically very similar. The conceptions of the mental elements of torts and crimes are quite similar. Just put torts and crimes all in a category of wrongs, for a moment ( by the way, many acts can b the basis for both criminal and tort or civil action. For example, O.J. Simpson was charged with a crime and sued civily (sic). ). So we have, neglegence or unintentional wrongs, reckless (grossly neglegent )wrongs and intentional wrongs. Justice Powell's pronouncement on the recklessness standard that tort law presumes that a person intends the necessary and foreseeable consequences of their actions can be applied with comfortable logic to criminal recklessness, which can be the basis for either manslaughter or 2nd Degree murder. The only reason the existing law doesn't take that logical step is political economic when it comes to capitalist profiteering killings. The curent law is bourgeois ideology, of course, and the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling classes.
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> The same principle applied to many profit before people decisions supplies a
> reckless mental element that corresponds to the mental element of
> recklessness or depraved indifference to human life that are
> elements of legal murder, although the bourgeois criminal legal
> system does not consistently apply its own logic, of course. The
> types of killings that Max distinguishes are more logically
> comparable than he indicates.
>
> One infamous example it Ford's foreknowledge of the exploding
> rearended Pinto. Recall was more expensive than paying wrongful
> death suits and so they let the people die. That is profits
> before people murder in a Peoples' Court.
Is it capital murder, even in a peoples' court? Is it as deserving of punishment as what Tim McVeigh did?
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CB: A mon avis, oui. It is both capital and capiatalist murder. Capital murder is punished by life imprisonment in Michigan. Capital murder is not punished by the death penalty in every state. May have been more total people died and were maimed in exploding Pintos than in the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing
Charles Brown