resurrectionsong

January 15, 2004

Taking Responsibility

Imagine this scenario:

A woman organizes a group of men to break into an ex-boyfriend's residence. During the break-in, the police are notified and respond. The woman and one of the men that she recruited leave the scene of the burglary and lead the police on a chase.

At a certain point, the woman and the driver are separated and the woman gives herself up to police officers. Before doing so, she had given a gun to the driver of the vehicle. When police try to apprehend the man, he shoots one of the police dead. He then uses the officer's gun to kill himself.

In Colorado, if you are a party to a felony, if a person is killed during the commission of the felony all of the parties to that felony are responsible for the murder. The woman was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

She organized the break-in. She provided the gun. There is a direct relationship between those things that she set in motion and the death of a police officer.

That woman, Lisl Auman, may not have pulled the trigger, but she is just as responsible for the killing of Officer VanderJagt as if she had. Even so, she has become somewhat of a celebrity cause with voices across the United States calling for her murder conviction to be overturned. Many of those voices have called her sentence overly harsh and unfair.

Assistant Attorney General Paul Koehler summed up my feelings on the subject rather nicely.

"Of course it's a harsh rule. It's intended to be a harsh rule to make sure people take adult responsibility for their actions," he said.

It's a good law and I'm glad she's in jail. The events she set in motion ended when Officer VanderJagt was dead, leaving behind a wife and child. If she had not set those events in motion--if she had never recruited others to help her burgle a home--the deaths would not have occurred.

Read the story.
Read TalkLeft's post on the same subject for a differing point of view.
And for a point of view much closer to my own, read this from the Colorado Conservative.

Posted by zombyboy at January 15, 2004 06:05 PM | TrackBack

Comments

I'm not sure, but I believe under laws like that in other states if not Colorado, she could have been charged with murder even if the police officer had killed the driver and the driver had killed no one. (Assuming it was a righteous shooting and not murder by the policeman.)

Yeah, it's harsh all right, but rightly so. You take part in what turns out to be a violent crime, you gotta pay the price.

Posted by: McGehee at January 16, 2004 04:24 AM

I disagree with your take on it, and I don't believe that Lisl provided the gun.

My position is not that Lisl Auman was a true innocent, but with the danger posed by the legal arguments used to convict her. I wrote about this some time ago: http://home.earthlink.net/~swheeler843/OlderArticles/FelonyMurder.html.

Posted by: wheels at January 16, 2004 07:36 PM

WHAT???? Judges are suppossed to have a firm grasp on logical reasoning. Let's say I start an armed security guard company. One day, one of my guards goes insane and starts shooting people with the gun I issued him. Does that make me responsible for the deaths he caused? Of course not! The only difference is that I hired these guards legally for a legal job, whereas the woman in Colorado hired her goons illegally for an illegal operation. The person firing the gun should hold sole responsibiliy: This man would've shot a cop in a similar situation on any of his illegal jobs regardless of who hired him. The woman who hired him would've never instructed him to shoot anybody, nor would she herself shoot anybody, and she probably had no idea he was carrying a gun in the first place. Setting an example of what? How conservative judges have no concept of right and wrong? This incident makes me want to shoot some judges.

Posted by: Randy at January 19, 2004 03:58 PM