[Steve_Seattle]

"BUT she told the jury they could rule on a lesser charge of manslaughter, which he is not charged with. He should be a free man."

I don't know if murder 2 is considered a capital offense, but if it is, the Supreme Court has ruled that a jury MUST have the option of ruling for a lesser charge (manslaughter). The reason is that the court did not want juries to have to choose between a guilty verdict that they were unsure of and simply setting someone free, so it gives them a middle ground. The judge probably threw out the child abuse thing because it is a different type of crime than murder and not simply a lesser charge.

[Springfield Reformer]

I believe she had to throw it out because, as someone has posted elsewhere, this was an attempt to get to felony murder, and it was too deeply flawed for even this court to make it work. Felony murder is when you kill someone during the commission of some *other* felony. But here, because the alleged child abuse and alleged felony murder were one and the same event, the legal argument is fatally circular. The felony during which you also manage to kill someone can be some other event, like a burglary or a rape or even the killing of a third party, but it logically can’t be the same exact event.