Voices: Involuntary insanity

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October 23, 2009

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Fri Oct 23, 2009, 02:26 PM CDT

My lack of understanding must be excused. There must be some unmentioned legal technicality or significant factor to explain such an anomaly as charging a person who has imbibed alcohol in a quantity that provides a blood alcohol level “more than three times the legal limit for driving” with involuntary manslaughter.

Drinking to that extent and choosing to drive are voluntary acts. Using almost any other means to kill someone is called premeditated murder or murder in the first degree. Why is there such meticulous discrimination in cases such as the recent Calvin Yarbrough indictment?

Contemplate what charge would be placed against a pilot who drank and crashed a plane, killing several people and injuring others. Would such injuries be labeled “second-degree assault”?

Where is the evenhandedness, the justice, in providing diminished capacity for crimes because the persons charged have chosen to impair themselves with a drug?

Labeling the crime involuntary is oxymoronic!

Fred Dunn

Grove, Okla.

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Voices: Involuntary insanity

At the request of Republican lawmakers, taxpayers are funding a 24-hour security camera to watch over a Rush Limbaugh bust in the Missouri Capitol. Do you think this is needed?

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