Short Stuff: Killing a Dead Body

If you try to kill someone who was already dead is that a bad thing? Yeah? How bad?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. It's Josh, it's Chuck,
and we're both alive for now.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Well, I'll tell you what, buddy, if I was ever dead,
I would I would want you to make sure of
it by killing me again.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Yeah, but you'd be setting me up for a real
legal quagmire that probably would not break in my favorite Chuck.
So I don't know if I can guarantee that.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
I wish I could do.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
A good impression of the late actor slash magician, slash
kind of comedian Ricky j because anyone who's ever seen
the to my mind great pt Anderson movie from nineteen
ninety nine, Magnolia, it is great.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
We'll recall and if you're interested.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
By the way, our friend of the show, Josh's boyfriend
Adam Pranica, was on my pt Anderson series on movie Crush,
so we covered Magnolia and all the pt Anderson movies
before the show ended.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
That is, I've got one even better than you.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
What's that.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Are?

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Another friend of the show, Paul F. Tompkins.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
P F.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Tompkins, not pt Anderson. He did a script reading for
Magnolia at the table with all the actors and apparently
was not doing well enough for Tom Cruise not to
say something like can we keep getting this right or
something that's a hilarious sorry, I've never heard where Tom
Cruise is essentially like being mean to PF. Tompkins for
not doing good job script reading.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Well that I sort of like Tom Cruise until then
because Pauluck Tompkins is a national treasure and he was
actually in the movie There will be Blood because I
don't know, maybe he did such a good job at
that table reading.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, yeah, that's another pt Anderson film, right, yeah, where
he goes I'm done with drinking milkshake or something.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
That's it. I don't want any more milkshake, thank you.
I think it's the line.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Why are we talking about Magnolia.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Because once again, at the beginning of that movie, there's
a series of vignettes. Ricky Jay narrates them, and the
first I think it's the first one I don't recall,
but it's it's a very kind of cool sequence where
there's this story is told where a guy named Sidney
Barringer attempted suicide but it became a suicide. The long

(02:11):
and short of it is he jumped out of a
window his parents lived in the apartment or in an
apartment below him, and as he jumped and was falling
to what he thought would be his death, his mom
and dad got into an argument. His mom aims a
shotgun at the dad, the gun goes off, It goes

(02:31):
through the window, missing the father, and kills the son
on his way down to land. The guy didn't know
this when he went to jump off the building, but
there was a net down there that would have caught
him and saved his life.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, so it went from him taking his own life
to his mom murdering him, to his suicide being ruled
an attempted one. He couldn't have completed it because of
that net. But it gets even crazier because when the
police show up, the mom and dad say, we have
no idea how this shotgun was loaded. We use it

(03:03):
to threaten one another all the time, so we know
not to load it. And upon more investigation, they found
that Sydney had loaded it. So he loaded the gun
that killed him, and so the medical examiner ruled it
a suicide.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
After all, that's right, This story is not true, as
it turns out, it was based on the story of
Ronald Opus, which came from an oral story of the
President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Don Harper Mills,
in nineteen eighty seven.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
He told the story at a banquet.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Eventually found its way to the Internet, but Mills maintains
that he made it up to illustrate how turning up
new evidence can completely alter the outcome of a coroner's ruling.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Right, And it's a really good example of just how
strange turns of events in evidence collection can completely alter
a medical examiner's ruling on the cause of death. And
that also applies to an entirely like niche I guess

(04:04):
area of legal legal scholarship, which is can you murder
someone who's already dead? And it turns out it's not
nearly as straightforward as you would think.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
All right, let's take a break, what a tease, and
we'll come back with more talk of boogie nights and
heart eight right after this.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Definitely should know.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Y s k as Why why s k as good?

Speaker 1 (04:42):
You should know? So, Chuck, we were talking about whether
it's possible legally to murder a dead body. Obviously physically
it's not. And there's actual case law where people have
done something like this, and legal scholars, prosecutors, defense teams,

(05:03):
juries have had to sort this out, and one of
the best known ones came in France in nineteen eighty.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Six, that's right, with the death of Monsieur Wilkins. Monsieur
Wilkins got in a brawl with Monsieur Charro.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
Is that right? Okay?

Speaker 1 (05:18):
But I mean it's messieurs charrow What I say, monsieur?

Speaker 3 (05:23):
How do you pronounce it monsieur? Really? Why is it
mon Is that all silent?

Speaker 1 (05:28):
It's just the French doing their French thing.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
So Monsieur isn't isn't anything at all?

Speaker 1 (05:33):
No, it's monsieur.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
I've heard of monsieur. I just thought this was a
more formal title or something. No, No, I know that's
it spelled in.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
That's weird, that's the famous monsieur.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
All right, So monsieur all right.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
So Monsieur Charro was in this brawl with Monsieur Wilkins.
Wilkins was knocked unconscious by an iron bar by Monsieur Charro,
and then Monsieur Charro used that same iron bar to
strangle Monsieur Wilkins. The next day, another dude, Monsieur Pied
deer Rot came along and it was like, Hey, this

(06:07):
Wilkins guy's still alive, and so I'm gonna I'm gonna
beat him to death with a glass bottle and strangle
him just to make sure that he's dead. The medical
examiner found that Chirou had actually killed him, so he
was dead. So then the question remains what happens to
Pederot when he commits this seeming active murder on a

(06:31):
dead body?

Speaker 1 (06:32):
Right, So there's an actual answer for this, And before
we get to the answer, we have to talk about
a couple of illegal things in another case. Yes, okay,
so the people who are arguing against Pedderow's guilt, so say,
his defense team said he cannot be charged with murder
or even attempted murder because murdering Monsieur Wilkins was a

(06:56):
legal impossibility. It was impossible for him to complete this act,
which means that he can't possibly be guilty of it.
And that was apparently a longstanding idea in law of
this idea of a legal impossibility and guilt, right, And
so some people said, Okay, that's actually a pretty good explanation.

(07:19):
I think he might not be guilty, and other people said, wait, wait, wait,
forget this legal impossibility, mumbo jumbo. What we think is
more important is intent. What did he intend to do?
He thought that Willikins was still alive when he tried
to murder him, so his intent was to murder this man.
Therefore he's guilty of attempt to murder. And everybody said,

(07:41):
what to do, what to do? Sacrobo, that's right.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
I thought that was sacred blow.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
So they said we must look to see if there's
any precedent that was in the eighties. And I don't
know if they actually looked at the American case or not,
because you can't really say president on someone else's country, right.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
No, No, it's not precedent necessary, but I think like
it's out there. Sure, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
So New York City, nineteen seventy five, eleven years before
the French incident, as it's known by me only, there
were some dudes drinking and an apartment. Three guys drinking.
The guy's apartment was Michael Geller and another guy, Joe Bush,
had been staying there kind of free loading, staying with
the guy, and they're sitting there getting a little more drunk. Obviously,
some hot heads. Hot heads kind of guys, and Geller

(08:32):
started saying like, hey, dude, you've been crashing here. I
need some rent. Why don't you start chipping in on rent.
This thing escalated such that Bush eventually shot him three
times in the chest and the guy falls to the floor.
And then the third guy comes in, Melvin Dlugash, and
stands over Geller and fires five more shots into his head.

(08:53):
Both of these guys are charged, obviously with murder, but
once again, Delugash his was, Hey, this guy was already dead,
or at least you can't prove that he was alive
when I shot him five times in the head. He
wasn't initially convicted of murder, but it was overturned, saying
that you can't prove that he was dead, so you
can't charge me with.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Murder, right, And I just want to say, this seems
like a fairly shocking crime. But this took place while
there's still lead in America's gasoline. Yeah, so, yeah, like
you said, blue Gash, that's the best way you could
say that horrible name. Yeah, he got off because, yeah,
the prosecution couldn't prove that Geller was still alive, and

(09:36):
New York Supreme Courts had done up not so fast.
It doesn't matter whether Geller was still alive. You thought
he might have still been alive, which is why you
shot him five times in the head. And we're going
to throw out this idea of legal impossibility and adopt
basically a new framework, or at least we're going to
take an existing framework and basically make it the framework,

(09:58):
which is intent. Yeah, that is that, like, what you
intended to do determines your guilt or innocence, not the
actual fact or possibility of whether you could have done
what you were trying to do.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Right.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Specifically, the charge is attempted murder. What you can't do
is charge somebody with murder, right, because you can't murder
a corpse. It's just not scientifically. Forget legally it's not
scientifically possible, right, kill something that is already dead. But
attempted murder you certainly can. So the French High Court
weighs in on the Pardrieux case with monsieur.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
What a dope this is? This is an an instant
classic because of that, and.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
They came to the same conclusion and they said, all right,
you're guilty of attempted murder. Then, because our friend the
Yanks across the pond. They informed our opinion on this.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Perhaps, yeah, perhaps, so there's at least one more that
we want to call out. This actually happens with surprising frequency.
I would not think that there would be more than
one or two cases, but there are some here there.
One that I saw was that it's sometimes used to
prosecute cops who shoot people a bunch of times. There

(11:13):
was a cop in Toronto who a guy came at
with a knife and he shot him three times and
the guy dropped, and then he went up and shot
him a bunch more times when the guy was on
the ground, and the jury said, nope, that was illegal murder.
We can't convict you of murder because this is in
the line of duty and it was the bullets after

(11:33):
the shots. After that, we can now convict you of
attempted murder.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
It also happened to our dear friends in Australia in
the case of what looks like a mercy killing in
twenty fourteen near one of our favorite cities, Melbourne. Two guys,
Daniel Darrington and Rocky Spartacus Matt Scassey what a name. Yeah,
they got in a fight. We're struggling over a gun.

(11:59):
The gun went off, well, I was about to say killed.
It struck Matt Scassie in the head. His bodies on
the ground, twitching around and stuff, and Darrington shoots him.
He's like, hey, I don't want this guy, and the
quote was didn't want the blokes suffering and killed him
for sure, then went back got more bullets and then

(12:22):
shot him again. And he was charged with murder. And
the jury said, you know, we can't find him guilty
because the prosecution didn't kill that you intended to kill
him when the gun went off to begin.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
With, right, But they did find guilty of attempted murder
because he demonstrated quite clearly that he thought Matt's Cassie
was still alive and shot him to kill him. However
merciful the act was supposed to be. And he got
convicted of attempted murder for that one.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
Had I not had he not tried to be merciful
and put Matt's Cassie out of his misery and just
the initial shot had killed them, he wouldn't have been
convicted of anything at all.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, it would have been I guess a struggle, maybe
even self defense. Who knows how they would have framed it.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah, for sure, So I guess that's the that's the
takeaway here. If somebody is potentially already dead, call an ambulance.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
This kind of thing, I feel like is in movies
a lot. I feel like it often comes up as
like to prove your loyalty to the organization, like someone's
in there, like I killed most of them. You got
to finish them off so we're both liable or whatever.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Oh yeah, I see that a lot of movies. I
feel like, Sure, short stuff, I guess it's out.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
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