People
v. Beardsley
Supreme
Court of
150
Dressler,
p. 118-121
Facts:
The
defendant holed up with the alleged victim at his residence and drank for an
entire weekend except for Sunday afternoon.
The victim apparently overdosed morphine and died after the defendant
left her with a neighbor. The defendant
was charged with manslaughter. The
defendant appealed.
Issue:
Was
Beardsley responsible for an omission that would make him liable for Burns’s
death?
Rule:
Omission is
defined as the neglect of a legal duty, rather than a merely moral duty.
Analysis: The court finds that Burns
was not Beardsley’s wife or child and Beardsley was not Burns’s custodian or
caretaker. The court notes that Burns
was an adult and cavorted with Beardsley of her own free will. The court suggests that there would be no
question of a legal duty if the principals in this case had been two men. It should not make a difference, it is argued,
that the victim was a woman. The court
concludes that Beardsley had no legal duty towards Burns.
Conclusion:
The court
set aside the conviction and let Beardsley go free.
Notes
and Questions
1. I disagree
with Hughes in that he neglects one’s duty to oneself. If the court set up incentives such that
everyone had the legal duty to help others upon pain of punishment, the
potential “helplessly ill person” will in turn be given less incentive to help
themselves when they are likely to be the cheapest cost absorber in a given
situation. I believe that if you accept
Hughes’s argument, you must also accept that Beardsley would have to be held
responsible for failing to come to the aid of a male drinking partner. I believe that this is bad policy, but that
it is not as far fetched as the court would have us believe.
2. This sounds
like the “good Samaritan” rule.
3. I believe this
is a duty that could be appropriately imposed by statute, that is: if you have
some connection to the apparent perpetrator of a crime, then you have some
responsibility to intervene to help the victim.
I don’t think Nix would have a duty to act if she was riding in a taxi
and heard someone crying for help in the trunk, even if she was left alone in
the taxi for a time. Generally, however,
this is a situation where we would like to create a strong incentive for
someone with the capacity to act to do so to prevent harm.
4. Aha…this
sounds like a classic collective action problem. People fail to ask themselves, “If not me,
who?” They all assume someone else is
going to take care of it, and therefore no one takes care of it.
1. So omissions
can be more ambiguous than actions. We
don’t know where to draw the line between punishable and non-punishable
omission. We also don’t want to
encourage people to intervene when they might do more harm than good. A difference is asserted between positively causing
a harm and negatively withholding a benefit. I don’t think we should punt on omission as
an element of crime just because it’s difficult. We should draw the lines we can draw while
assuring fair notice and lenity, but when the omission is clearly abhorrent to
society (a retributivist
justification) or when an inexpensive act could prevent an excessively
expensive harm (a utilitarian
justification), it ought to be a crime.
2. This does not
seem like a good policy. What is the
benefit in holding someone blameless when they won’t come forward to report
knowledge of an impending crime? We
ought to give that potential informant a strong incentive to come forward. I suppose we do so with positive rewards,
like on “Unsolved Mysteries” (these are our “carrots”) rather than with
negative punishments (“sticks”). Is this
adequate?