Slattery Richard Freelance NYDN/Slattery, Richard Freelancer NYD
Drunk driver Martin Heidgen being led into court in 2006.
For going on a 10-hour binge, for getting behind the wheel of a pickup truck blind drunk, for driving the wrong way on a parkway, and for smashing into a wedding-party limousine, killing 7-year-old flower girl Katie Flynn and the limo driver, a jury convicted Martin Heidgen of two counts of murder in 2006.
The following year, a judge sentenced Heidgen, then 25, to a minimum of 18 years and a maximum of life in prison. But he was not done with the legal system. Last week, Heidgen’s lawyers asked New York’s highest court to throw out the conviction on the ground that Heidgen was too drunk to commit murder.
This is no joke, and the Court of Appeals took the matter very, very seriously. It had to, because the court opened the door to just this kind of insane argument by torturing what had been a readily understandable, common sense homicide statute into a dictate for mind-reading exercises.
Very basically, the Penal Law covers two forms of homicide. First, intentional murder: You want to shoot someone, and you do, killing that person.
Second, what’s known as murder showing depraved indifference to human life: You don’t set out to kill someone, but you engage in outrageously reckless conduct that does kill someone.
Such as randomly firing a machine gun from your apartment balcony. Or opening the lion cage at the zoo with children standing outside. Or, it would seem, driving so drunk that you can’t figure out the right direction on a major roadway.
Unfortunately, the court rejected such elegant simplicity. Rather than let juries consider the circumstances and decide whether a defendant had been “so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so devoid of regard of the life or lives of others” as to be guilty of murder, the court ruled that prosecutors had to prove, in effect, the defendants wanted to be that irresponsible.
That brings us back to the argument posed by Heidgen’s lawyers: He was too drunk to understand what he was doing, thus he was too drunk to be depraved, thus he was not guilty of murder.
Attorneys for two other convicts made similar claims. One had taken ecstasy, stripped naked and sped 80 miles an hour on Forest Ave. in Staten Island with her headlights off before killing a pedestrian. One had gotten severely drunk and, like Heidgen, driven the wrong direction on a parkway, provoking a fatal collision.
Having needlessly twisted up the homicide statute, the Court of Appeals dare not now allow killer drunken drivers to get passes from murder charges on the ground that they were drunk. The court needs to recognize that driving while blind drunk is, in and of itself, depraved.
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=15646
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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