Asheville firefighter who shot at cyclist will not receive attempted murder charge
Preapocalyptic technological dystopia, getting off easy again, vexation of the spirit August 17th, 2009
Remember that firefighter from Asheville, NC who stopped to tell a bicyclist that bicycling was too dangerous and he shouldn’t do it? And when the bicyclist left he pulled out a gun and shot him? Yeah that guy.
Well a grand jury has refused to return an indictment on attempted murder. It is not attempted murder to shoot a bicyclist in the head, but miss, in Asheville NC if you are a respected public servant devoted to protecting the safety of others.
It makes me wonder– if he’d had better aim, and killed this man, what charge would he get? Violation of a noise ordinance, maybe?
Erik Ryberg
August 17th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Disgusting. No other words for it.
August 18th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I was not present in the grand jury room and do not know the facts no have no comment.
August 18th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Read the linked story – “attempted first degree murder” – which would require pre-meditation and was the wrong charge to start with, so I have little doubt that the GJ rejected it. The DA should have given them the option of attempted second degree murder, which is the proper NC charge to fit this crime and thus would’ve passed a Grand Jury with flying colors. It certainly looks like the DA, for whatever motivation, gave them the option between a “lowball” charge and one that they would have no choice but to reject, so as to force the lowball charge without having to personally take the heat. (“Hey, it wasn’t me – the Grand Jury picked that charge!”)
August 18th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Premeditation is a red herring. I’ll never forget the day in Crim Law when we all learned, to our surprise, that in the law “premeditation” can occur in the blink of an eye, immediately prior to the finger pulling the trigger.
I don’t know what happened here but I know it is not hard to get a grand jury to indict — the defendant is not present and not represented in the proceeding, and the rules of evidence are very lax. The common saying is that any competent prosecutor ought to be able to indict a ham sandwich in a grand jury proceeding.
I’m thinking if the cyclist had shot the fireman, this whole thing would be unfolding very, very differently.
EBR
August 18th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Guns are designed to kill things. If you shoot a gun at someone, you are attempting to kill the person you are shooting at.
If that isn’t how the lay looks at it, it should be.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
If that isn’t how the LAW looks at it, it should be.
August 19th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Regardless of how possible it is to stretch the law’s definition to suit any whim, what it really comes down to is a jury’s common sense differentiation of what *they* know as “premeditation” vs. reacting in a flash of anger – the latter being something that every single jury member has done to a lesser degree at some point. Attempted second degree murder would’ve been a slam-dunk, first degree might’ve been possible but hardly probable, and the DA had to have known that as well as anybody – it *is* his job to pursue the most likely route to conviction after all, if conviction is what he’s really after here.
August 19th, 2009 at 9:09 am
And yeah Eric, I do agree that if the gun had been in the cyclist’s hand, he would not have gotten the same “poison-pill” play from the DA – the full weight of the entire city would have come down on him like a ton ‘o bricks.