I'd say another thing that separates us from animals is the ability to shoot the man who killed your family and get away without being convicted of a crime. Based on that I'd say he's innocent. And yes that has the same argumentative weight as your specious reasoning.
Interesting that you find it specious. We have laws, this man didn't follow them. While he will attract the sympathy of all, he's outside the law.
There's no "slippery slope" here.
It's either Murder II or Voluntary Manslaughter depending on mitigating circumstances but it most certainly is not 'nothing'. In this case the man went and retrieved a firearm with intent to kill the perp, it is definitely Murder II. Doesn't mean TE isn't off the table, but he had intent to kill.
Murder 2 is typically a non pre-meditated murder; some provocation or mitigating circumstance can knock it down to manslaughter. With the mitigating circumstance being this drunk asshole just killed this guys kids, I don't see how anyone convicts him of murder 2.
This is total nonsense. Murder is something thatonlyhumans do. Animals don't murder, not by the definition we use for that word. When animals do kill something, it is so rarely out of anger or a desire for revenge that it is basically a non-event. That is, again, something only humans do. To take two things that only humans do and describe that as animalistic is absurd. Even if he did it, it wouldn't be murder, it would be manslaughter. A person in emotional (and probably physical) shock isn't capable of premeditation, a prerequisite for murder.
I respectfully disagree. The operative issue is intent to kill. Of course it's very likely a jury won'tconvictbut that's what he did. In some jurisdictions, you could even go with Murder I because there was a time lapse between the accident and his 'execution' whereby he thought about killing the guy, retrieved a weapon and acted on a plan. I'm not sure because it didn't seem to say the time lapse. I could see Murder I being impossible if he literally woke up a few seconds later after the daze wore off and pulled the gun out of his glove box and opened fire... but then how did he know the guy was drunk?
Each states laws are different, and the differences are codified by statute. In Texas, you're right. Any intent to kill and its murder. Under the model penal code (which isn't the law in any state, exactly, but parts of it are adopted by many states) we have:
