By Shaila K. Dewan, The New York Times
It was a parent’s - and a police officer’s - worst nightmare. Last weekend, Timothy Stansbury Jr., an unarmed teenager with no criminal record, was shot and killed on the roof of a Brooklyn housing project by Officer Richard S. Neri, an 11-year veteran who had never fired his gun and had no history of civilian complaints.
It soon became a nightmare for the city as well, pitting law enforcement’s need for self-protection versus the vulnerability of citizens at the hands of the police. Rank-and-file officers, angered that the police commissioner said the shooting did not appear to be justified, have said it was an accident and should be treated as such. But Mr. Stansbury’s family has called it murder.
Legally, a killing can rank anywhere on a finely graded continuum between pure accident and capital case. Even an unjustified homicide is not necessarily a criminal one. So the shooting raises the question: at what point does an accident become a crime?
In the law, there is a place where accident and crime touch: criminally negligent homicide, in which the guilty party need not have been aware of the potential danger of his actions. Manslaughter, too, is accidental in a sense: it indicates that harm, but not death, was intended. “The gradations all turn on one question and that is, what was the state of mind of the actor?” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law.
But there is legal justice, and then there is moral justice, which takes into account the mind of the actor not only during, but after, the killing. It weighs responsibility and penance, atonement and sorrow. Does the notion of sincere apology matter? Is it necessary to assign blame, and if so, how?
To some, intent matters far less than actions. “A German writer named Kurt Tucholsky wrote, ‘The opposite of good is good intentions,’ ” said Susan Neiman, a philosopher who directs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. “Somebody saying, ‘Oops, it was a reflex, I didn’t mean to kill your son,’ it doesn’t do anything to console the brute fact.”
Some cases of unintentional killing have a more clear-cut judicial trajectory than others. Last month Representative Bill Janklow of South Dakota was sentenced to 100 days in jail for manslaughter after running a stop sign and killing a motorcyclist. A central issue in his trial was whether he had eaten on the day of the accident, because his lawyers argued that he was in a haze brought on by diabetes and low blood sugar. The jury foreman, James G. Mitchell, said that even though the jurors had not wanted to convict Mr. Janklow, who has now resigned from Congress, they had to conclude that it did not matter if he had been afflicted. “Mr. Janklow knew about his medical condition and he knew his responsibility to take care of himself,” Mr. Mitchell said.
Sometimes a kind of reckoning, if not quite justice, occurs. In 1999, the writer Stephen King complained when no jail time was given to a driver who, distracted by the dog in his car, nearly killed Mr. King. “What he took from me, my time, my peace of mind and my ease of body, are simply gone and no court can bring them back,” Mr. King said at the time, adding that he believed the man, Bryan Edwin Smith, was a danger to himself and others. Just over a year after the accident, Mr. Smith, 43, was found dead in his mobile home in Maine.
IN the Stansbury case, a grand jury has yet to decide whether Officer Neri will face criminal charges, including criminally negligent homicide. Negligence itself is an amorphous idea. What about the Con Edison worker whose improper repair job caused the death, by electrocution, of a New York woman walking her dog last month? What about the bartender who serves one too many drinks? The police officer who hits an innocent person while chasing a bad guy?
“It often comes up now more and more that it’s not the police car that kills the innocent person, it’s the car being pursued,” said Joseph D. McNamara, a former police chief who is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. But, he said, the bar of responsibility for the police is still high. “I suspended cops and lieutenants and sergeants for not stopping the chase if they’re pursuing a bunch of teenagers for a traffic violation at excessive speeds,” he said.
Sissela Bok, the author of “Common Values,” raised the philosophical question of moral luck. Two people drive home drunk, and one hits a child. Is one less criminal than the other? “How badly should we feel about the difference between accidents that happen and accidents that could have happened?” she asked.
In the psychological realm, she added, accidents are often considered the surfacing of some unconscious urge. “Some people have argued that the more we know about human beings and psychology, almost nothing is a complete accident,” Dr. Bok said. “And yet the more we know about our own makeup, psychological or other, the more responsible we are for our actions.”
Juries, however, can be far less interested in a defendant’s inner state. In the case of Andrea Yates, who was convicted of murder in the drowning of her five children, the jury had difficulty acquitting Ms. Yates by reason of insanity, said Lucy Puryear, a Houston psychiatrist who testified for the defense, when she had clearly committed the acts. “You get into the whole issue of personal responsibility,” Dr. Puryear said.
The urge to find even insane people responsible for their actions is in keeping with a litigious age, some experts said. “Our legal system has really ingrained us for the notion that somebody must be to blame for everything that happens, and that’s just not the case,” said June Price Tangney, a psychologist at George Mason University and a co-author of “Shame and Guilt.”
Still, Dr. Neiman said of Officer Neri, “you have to punish that kind of negligence in order to keep people on their toes and to keep people from doing it again.”
On the moral scales, guilty feelings are what guide people to atonement. Even if they cannot undo what is done, they can work to ensure it does not happen again. “What I tell people, especially when they say they feel guilty, I say that’s healthy, because it means they have an intact moral sense” said Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, adding that she thought perhaps in the case of Officer Neri, guilt was punishment enough.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” said he would counsel someone responsible for an accident to offer a public apology and a donation to charity, much like the “sin offerings” made in biblical times. “It was not a way of balancing the books so much as a way of reintroducing yourself to your better and more generous side,” he said. “It’s a way of letting yourself say, sometimes I’m weak and selfish or careless, but sometimes I can be strong and generous, too.”