Laws should make logical sense. When they leave reasonably intelligent people scratching their heads, they are bad laws.
That’s our reaction to the novel attempt by some Mississippi prosecutors in recent years to try to charge alleged perpetrators with murder when their accomplices are killed by the targeted victims or even by law enforcement.
The first we heard of that strategy was in the sensational murder-for-hire case in 2012 involving Dr. Arnold Smith. Among the several initial charges against the former Greenwood oncologist was one of capital murder, which held Smith culpable for the death of one of the hit men, Keaira Byrd, Smith allegedly hired in an unsuccessful attempt to kill attorney Lee Abraham. Byrd was felled by an agent from the Attorney General’s Office who helped thwart the alleged assassination plot.
The court vacillated under what murder statute it would allow Smith to be charged — from capital murder to the lesser charge of depraved heart murder and back to capital murder — before the prosecution was halted by the finding that Smith was mentally incompetent to stand trial.
The argument for a murder charge seemed bizarre if the facts alleged by the prosecution alleged were true: that Smith hired Byrd, that Byrd willingly agreed to try to kill Abraham, and that the bullet that killed Byrd was fired by a law enforcement officer.
We suspect, if this case had gone to trial, at least that one charge against Smith would have gone nowhere.
But those in law enforcement apparently want to continue to push the theory.
Last week in Hinds County, Samuel Parker Reed was charged, among other things, with capital murder after his alleged accomplice in a home invasion, Cameron Jackson, was fatally shot in self-defense by a person who lived in the home.
If the law truly allows such prosecutions, the law is absurd.
In crimes such as those in which Smith and Reed were allegedly involved, defendants face serious enough charges that could put them behind bars for a very long time. It’s piling on to load up the case against them by claiming they are also legally responsible for any misfortune to befall their accomplices during the commission of the crime.
Such prosecutions are a blatant contradiction. You have prosecutors claiming that the deaths of the offenders were justifiable homicide by the people who fired the weapon but a crime by those who didn’t. If you take that argument to its logical absurdity, then any misfortune to befall a criminal — even the plotting of the crime itself — is the fault not of the criminal but whoever else was in on the crime.
There is no making sense of that.
