Cont: Man shot, killed by off-duty Dallas police officer who walked into wrong apartment p2

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Thermal said:
Right, but when you are not on your toes for details, you could easily not pay attention to painted and lit up numberings. The red mat is much tougher to miss. Strains credibility, even. As I read the descriptions earlier, the walks were structurally identical.

As I see it, she made one small mistake: driving one too many floors in a presumably corkscrew garage. Walking on autopilot, not seeing signs. I mean, I can't remember the last time I looked at my house numbers or street signs.

But when you draw and shoot, you have no excuses.
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Ok.
 
Thermal said:
Right, but when you are not on your toes for details, you could easily not pay attention to painted and lit up numberings. The red mat is much tougher to miss. Strains credibility, even. As I read the descriptions earlier, the walks were structurally identical.

As I see it, she made one small mistake: driving one too many floors in a presumably corkscrew garage. Walking on autopilot, not seeing signs. I mean, I can't remember the last time I looked at my house numbers or street signs.

But when you draw and shoot, you have no excuses.
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The red mat is not a big deal for the defense. She was tired, walking to her apartment ready to go to bed.

Defense: In your expert opinion, would it be normal for someone suffering from severe sleep deprivation, to not notice something like a mat on the floor?

Expert: The only thing on her mind would have been to get into bed and go to sleep.
 
Drewbot said:
The red mat is not a big deal for the defense. She was tired, walking to her apartment ready to go to bed.

Defense: In your expert opinion, would it be normal for someone suffering from severe sleep deprivation, to not notice something like a mat on the floor?

Expert: The only thing on her mind would have been to get into bed and go to sleep.
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Anything at all to show that the hilited is true?
 
I would add, that I know that the mat wouldn't matter to someone who is sleep deprived, in the same way that Detectives know that they can get people to confess to crimes if they keep them up.

No sleep until you confess buddy.
 
plague311 said:
Anything at all to show that the hilited is true?
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776459/

A little more noticeable than a red mat.

False confession is a major contributor to the problem of wrongful convictions in the United States. Here, we provide direct evidence linking sleep deprivation and false confessions. In a procedure adapted from Kassin and Kiechel [(1996) Psychol Sci 7(3):125–128], participants completed computer tasks across multiple sessions and repeatedly received warnings that pressing the “Escape” key on their keyboard would cause the loss of study data. In their final session, participants either slept all night in laboratory bedrooms or remained awake all night. In the morning, all participants were asked to sign a statement, which summarized their activities in the laboratory and falsely alleged that they pressed the Escape key during an earlier session. After a single request, the odds of signing were 4.5 times higher for the sleep-deprived participants than for the rested participants. These findings have important implications and highlight the need for further research on factors affecting true and false confessions.
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Drewbot said:
The red mat is not a big deal for the defense. She was tired, walking to her apartment ready to go to bed.

Defense: In your expert opinion, would it be normal for someone suffering from severe sleep deprivation, to not notice something like a mat on the floor?

Expert: The only thing on her mind would have been to get into bed and go to sleep.
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Unless she had to go to the bathroom really bad.

Do you think she would even have mentioned something like that ?
" I had to piss like a racehorse, and rushed to [my] door as quick as I could "

Killing someone because you really had to pee might be so embarrassing that you would rather take a prison sentence than bring it up.
 
Drewbot said:
The red mat is not a big deal for the defense. She was tired, walking to her apartment ready to go to bed.

Defense: In your expert opinion, would it be normal for someone suffering from severe sleep deprivation, to not notice something like a mat on the floor?

Expert: The only thing on her mind would have been to get into bed and go to sleep.
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If I were the prosecutor I'd punch the sleep expert in the face and go "Sorry I've been up all day." I would repeat this until he shut up.

I'd also ask the sleep expert how many black people who shot cops during no knock warrants in the middle of the night he had defended in court.

I'd then ask him how literally anyone on the planet is still alive if society turns into the Purge after we've been awake for "a normal day."
 
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We don't know how long she was awake for, but if she worked a 16 hour shift, she was sleep deprived.

We also don't know what stressors she had during her previous shift.

We do know that police departments are aware of the effects of sleep deprivation.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/225762.pdf

We know that the likelihood of driving a police car into a telephone pole goes up with regard to sleep deprivation, so missing a red mat on the floor isn't going to be an issue.
 
Drewbot said:
We don't know how long she was awake for, but if she worked a 16 hour shift, she was sleep deprived.
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Then literally all of humanity is sleep deprived most of the time.

16 hour shift my achin' ass. I've worked 36 hours straight and THEN told to go stand an armed watch and I managed not to blunder into any innocent people's homes and shoot them.

You aren't given a license to kill when you don't clock out exactly at 8 hours.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Then literally all of humanity is sleep deprived most of the time.

16 hour shift my achin' ass. I've worked 36 hours straight and THEN told to go stand an armed watch and I managed not to blunder into any innocent people's homes and shoot them.

You aren't given a license to kill when you don't clock out exactly at 8 hours.
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The recommended amount of sleep for an adult is 7-9 hours. A 16 hour day still leaves 8 hours of it unaccounted for that could have been filled with sleep. Leaving her not sleep deprived at all. Who knows what she did the day before, but sleep deprivation sounds like a stretch.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Then literally all of humanity is sleep deprived most of the time.
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yes.


JoeMorgue said:
16 hour shift my achin' ass. I've worked 36 hours straight and THEN told to go stand an armed watch and I managed not to blunder into any innocent people's homes and shoot them.

You aren't given a license to kill when you don't clock out exactly at 8 hours.
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750,000 police officers in the U.S. many of them are sleep deprived, many have fallen asleep while driving, this was bound to happen. I am glad you don't suffer from sleep deprivation. You are truly something to behold.
 
Drewbot said:
yes.
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THEN YOUR POINT IS MEANINGLESS BECAUSE WE'RE NOT ALL KILLING EACH OTHER AND GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!

Darat, stay up for 16 hours and 1 minute and then ban this guy. //That was sarcasm before you get butthurt//
 
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JoeMorgue said:
THEN YOUR POINT IS MEANINGLESS BECAUSE WE'RE NOT ALL KILLING EACH OTHER AND GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!

Darat, stay up for 16 hours and 1 minute and then ban this guy.
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Only one person did it, that's why we are talking about it.

Why are you making up imaginary stories in your head about all of us killing each other.

If it happened all the time, this wouldn't be a topic.
 
Drewbot said:
Only one person did it, that's why we are talking about it.

Why are you making up imaginary stories in your head about all of us killing each other.

If it happened all the time, this wouldn't be a topic.
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His point is that if all society is sleep deprived, and we have millions of guns out there, and only this one instance happened. Then perhaps you're mistaken about the effects or ability to use it as an excuse.
 
I really cannot think of comparable life and death decisions where "being tired" is considered any kind of defense. It sometimes is part of an explanation of "why" something happened, but not a defense or excuse that makes it okay in the eyes of society or the law. "Gee I killed my patient under surgery but Hey, I was really tired at the time." "Sure I crashed the airplane but..." Yes, I blew through that stop sign at 90 mph and killed the kid on a bicycle but..."

This still applies even in regard to a "misunderstanding of the facts." The doctor was so tired he honestly thought he was cutting a vein not an artery. The pilot honestly misunderstood their altitude. The driver the shape of the sign. None of these things suddenly would make the lethal error okay.

I don't see how being tired and mistaking someone else's apartment for their own can be found to justify walking into a stranger's home and blowing away an innocent guy. Not ever by anyone. Even worse for the law enforcement profession. The very central core of a cop's job, responsibility, and training is to not do this.

Being tired might help at the sentencing stage but it shouldn't be relevant at all at the stages of being charged or tried.
 
Giordano said:
I really cannot think of comparable life and death decisions where "being tired" is considered any kind of defense. It sometimes is part of an explanation of "why" something happened, but not a defense or excuse that makes it okay in the eyes of society or the law. "Gee I killed my patient under surgery but Hey, I was really tired at the time." "Sure I crashed the airplane but..." Yes, I blew through that stop sign at 90 mph and killed the kid on a bicycle but..."

This still applies even in regard to a "misunderstanding of the facts." The doctor was so tired he honestly thought he was cutting a vein not an artery. The pilot honestly misunderstood their altitude. The driver the shape of the sign. None of these things suddenly would make the lethal error okay.

I don't see how being tired and mistaking someone else's apartment for their own can be found to justify walking into a stranger's home and blowing away an innocent guy. Not ever by anyone. Even worse for the law enforcement profession. The very central core of a cop's job, responsibility, and training is to not do this.

Being tired might help at the sentencing stage but it shouldn't be relevant at all at the stages of being charged or tried.
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Your examples (doctor, pilot, and driver) all involve doing things that have a minimal level of attentiveness built in. It's why one cannot perform surgery, fly a plane, or operate a car whilst drunk without facing criminal repercussions.

Making your way home from work does not have any minimal standard of attentiveness that it is considered criminal not to display. (With the obvious exception of the driving itself)
 
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Drewbot said:
We don't know how long she was awake for, but if she worked a 16 hour shift, she was sleep deprived.
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According to the civil lawsuit, Merritt says she said she had worked a 13 hour shift. There have been various news reports of 12 to 16 hours. I think the 13 hours is the most reliable figure we have at this point.

Drewbot said:
We also don't know what stressors she had during her previous shift.
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Her job was serving warrants. That mostly means arresting people all day. I think it likely she had plenty of stressors, in a general sense. We don't know if there was something in particular that day that may have set her mind adrift as she was going home.

Drewbot said:
We know that the likelihood of driving a police car into a telephone pole goes up with regard to sleep deprivation, so missing a red mat on the floor isn't going to be an issue.
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Here's another word to ponder: "prudent"

Texas Penal Code 1.07 defines reasonable belief as follows:

“Reasonable belief” means a belief that would be held by an ordinary and prudent man in the same circumstances as the actor.

Was Guyger's belief a belief that a prudent man would have held?

It is an interesting question in how to interpret that word. For a reasonable belief, we generally would conclude that a belief was truly held, or the person is lying, or the person was insane. I don't think anybody will argue that Guyger was insane. The evidence suggests that she is not lying. Can the jury conclude that it was an honest but unreasonable belief? Would that go against the premise that we only criminalize moral failures (with the possible exception of limited liability laws)?

Much will come down to how the court instructs the jury on these issues. I bet the prosecution is going to hammer the heck out of that word "prudent".
 
Giordano said:
I really cannot think of comparable life and death decisions where "being tired" is considered any kind of defense.
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Being tired isn't the defense. The defense is self-defense. Specifically, the castle law.

But there are a couple of issues with the castle law in this case:

1) It wasn't Guyger's house. But the castle law only requires that Guyger prove that she "had reason to believe that [Jean] unlawfully and with force entered [her apartment]". To establish that it was a reasonable belief, Guyger will have to provide convincing evidence that she really thought she was in her apartment.

1) The castle law doesn't apply if the person was "otherwise engaged in criminal activity" (other than a traffic violation). Guyger committed a crime when she entered Jean's apartment. But that could be nullified due to mistake of fact. Guyger didn't know she was committing a crime. She though she was going into her own apartment. She made a mistake of fact.

(Note that the law only says that a mistake of fact prevents prosecution. The will likely rule that it also negates the clause in the castle law about committing a crime. But that isn't a given.)

So Guyger has two reasons to need to prove that she thought she was in her apartment. In order to support that claim, Guyger may provide evidence that she made that mistake because she was tired. She doesn't have to. She could rely on the weight of other evidence to support her claim, which itself seems convincing that she really did think she was in her own apartment. (But since she said over and over on the 911 call how tired she was, it's going to come up at trial.)

If the defense were simply that she was tired, there would be no case. But it is not as simple as that.
 
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