Originally posted by: BlinderBomber
Originally posted by: alkemyst
Originally posted by: BlinderBomber
Originally posted by: BoomerD
In jurisprudence, entrapment is a legal defense by which a defendant may argue that he or she should not be held criminally liable for actions which broke the law, because he/she was induced (or entrapped) by the police to commit those acts. For the defense to be successful, the defendant must demonstrate that the police induced an otherwise unwilling person to commit a crime.
Now you're walking down a difficult road.
Situation 1: I go out to a bar, get drunk and drive myself home with incident.
Situation 2: I go out to a bar, get drunk and drive myself home except on the way there I hit and kill some guy walking his dog.
Only situation #2 is a crime. Why? The decisions I made in both situations are identical. The only difference is someone was unfortunate enough to cross my path on the way home. We punish people who kill someone differently depending on what their decisions were in the course of committing the crime - why do we take a different stance with drunk drivers?
Both are a crime, but I don't agree with the law. Same way you can travel with a firearm or you can do the same yet shoot people randomly.
Both are a crime, but why are they not punished equally? Why does the drunk driver that games home safely, who made the SAME choices as the other one, get a slap on the wrist, while the other gets to rot in jail?
When someone was explaining this situation to me, my knee-jerk reaction was to think it was stupid, but if you think about it the law really is strange. Both individuals make the same choice, yet one gets punished much, much more harshly than the other. Unlike in murders, where your actions dictate the punishment - here the outcome dictates the punishment.
I don't actually condone putting DDs away for 15 or 20 years, but it's an interesting thing to think about.