Negligent homicide is a criminal charge brought against a person who, through criminal negligence, allows another person to die.
Definition of Negligent Homicide
Putting aside hospitals, private residences and old-age homes, almost all of these superspreader events (SSEVs) took place in the context of (1) parties, (2) face-to-face professional networking events and meetings, (3) religious gatherings, (4) sports events, (5) meat-processing facilities, (6) ships at sea, (7) singing groups, and, yes, (8) funerals.
Working Definition of What Qualify as Superspreader Events for Covid-19
In September of 2017, Spencer Hight, his blood alcohol level four times the legal limit for driving, burst into a party his ex-wife was hosting and gunned down eight people. Almost two years later Texas authorities arrested the bartender who served him that evening, charging Lindsey Glass under the “Sale to Certain Persons” law. Prosecutors contended it was egregious Glass continued to serve Hight even as he acted unhinged and severely intoxicated round after round.
A Missouri woman was charged in 2012 with involuntary manslaughter connected with a party she hosted for her son’s friends. After acting as mixologist for the kids throughout the evening, fully cognizant she was responsible for a number of drunken teenagers, the woman allowed them to drive home. One killed a 16-year old girl. Her parents were not too forgiving about it.
It is a uniquely human trait to demand accountability when tragedy strikes, often in addition to or even at the expense of the responsibility victims have for their own sad circumstances. Involuntary manslaughter and negligent homicide laws address this inclination. Blame is often a balm for the frustration we feel when innocents suffer devastating results as a result of inexplicable degrees of separation. Yet and still, the laws are really meant to punish those who in fact clearly played a role as events unfolded, sometimes actually as the primary driver of the entire sequence. These aren’t merely scapegoats victims’ loved ones require for closure; they are fully culpable and to blame. They deserve to pay a price. Which brings us to Donald Trump.
How Covid-19 spreads is no mystery. Nobody believes large public gatherings can be held, particularly when attendees refuse to wear masks or seek space between each other, without risking the health of themselves and whoever they later come in close contact with. Examples of this rule are easy to find. A major Coronavirus cluster was created in Albany, Ga. after about 100 people attended a funeral and dispersed throughout the rural county. In Washington, one person infected 52 people at a single choir practice. The Rose Garden announcement of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court demonstrated to the nation how one event can lead to multiple infections, US Senators and MAGA elite just as vulnerable as anyone else.
We know with full confidence it is not “if” but “how many”group events will infect with Covid, and the larger the gathering the more will get sick, not just among the attendees, but throughout the communities they disperse to. It’s not theory, it’s fact that nobody disputes, but too many don’t seem to care much about it. Number one among those is Trump, himself, as recklessly disdainful of unarguable particulars his own White House Coronavirus task force has detailed as anybody.
In addition to certainty about how public gatherings spread Covid, we know the virus is dangerous, lethal to particular groups with underlying health conditions, particularly in minority communities. The numbers are clear, in just eight months near a quarter million have died directly from Covid-19. It is assured, not simply a random possibility, that spreading this virus will kill people. Just like, say drunk driving, there is no doubt that opportunity and increased numbers will result in the deaths of those exposed to others who were more reckless than they should have been.
If an otherwise upstanding citizen has a glass or two of wine at dinner and afterwards gets into a fatal accident that may or may not have been their fault, a slightly elevated blood alcohol could determine the legal consequences. However, if some guy pounds tequila shots and drives head-on into a family, his condition and how he got there is going to be the sole determinant of his legal fate. Negligent homicide accommodates the presumption he understood how criminally reckless his decision to drive was, accepting the consequences for anything that resulted.
Connecting the dots of our current national Covid status constructs a bleak picture. America heads into an ever darkening winter season at near 100K new Covid cases per day. Both deaths and hospitalizations are alarming public health officials from one coast to the other. Everywhere, in rural or urban jurisdictions alike, hospital administrators fret their ICU capacity is close to filled. Expert epidemiologists now grimly warn we stand at the precipice of the worst case we feared from the start, and necessitated the initial national lockdown nobody wanted to repeat. In other words, As Dr. Fauci grimly assessed last week, “we are losing control” of this pandemic.
Yet there is the Trump Campaign, day in and day out, playing the public health equivalent of quarters with Rum 151 shots up to three times per day. Wisconsin is perhaps the country’s worst virus hotspot, Trump packs together thousands in GreenBay and ridicules his opponent for “hiding in his basement.” Pennsylvanians are getting sicker by the day, but there is the President in Allentown hissing to maskless throngs all “fake news” wants to talk about is “Covid, Covid, Covid.”
Nowhere in the world is anybody doing what Trump engages in as often as his plane and advance teams will allow. After infecting himself with his own recklessness, the leader of the free world now literally equates patriotism with a willingness to inflict on others the condition he couldn’t get to an entire floor of world class medical treatment fast enough once his symptoms began. Of course, nobody else has such access; and thousands are dying and will continue to do so directly because of his unwillingness to modify what he knows is responsible for that carnage. Get another round over here! Pronto! We’re due in Florida soon! …It’s the negligent homicide, stupid! BC