Posted on 07/27/2007 1:17:37 PM PDT by Milwaukee_Guy
Still, I gotta say that I think that the Phoenix DA would have a hard time making a case before me if I were sitting on a jury that the fleeing suspect was responsible for the deaths of negligent onlookers far from the scene. I fully agree with charging them in the injury or deaths of anyone killed by the suspect or law enforcement during the apprehension, but it doesn't sit quite right with me about charging the suspect with murder for a distant TV helicopter crash.
What a weird precedent that would be. What if the suspect had been apprehended and sitting in the back of a police cruiser headed to jail and one of those helicopters ran out of fuel on the way back to the heliport thereby crashing and killing the crew? Would the suspect be guilty of murder then?
It's quite a stretch, I'm afraid to say. I'm not sure what to think of all this, and in cases where I'm not sure I'm not typically willing to endorse gymnastics in logic. It's just not particularly clear cut.
“Perhaps this will also set a precident for perps to get nominated for emmy’s should the news crew be awarded for good footage...isn’t that the reasoning here?”
Check out Rammstein’s “Ich Will” music video on YouTube.
It is exactly your scenario!
I want you to trust me
I want you to believe me
I want to feel your eyes
I want to control every heartbeat
I want to hear your voices
I want to disturb the peace
I want you to see me well
I want you to understand me
I want your fantasy
I want your energy
I want to see your hands
I want to go down in applause
Do you see me?
Do you understand me?
Do you feel me?
Do you hear me?
Can you hear me?
We hear you
Can you see me?
We see you
Can you feel me?
We feel you
I don’t understand you
I want
We want you to trust us
We want you to believe everything from us
We want to see your hands
We want to go down in applause - yeah
Can you hear me?
We hear you
Can you see me?
We see you
Can you feel me?
We feel you
I don’t understand you
Can you hear us?
We hear you
Can you see us?
We see you
Can you feel us?
We feel you
We don’t understand you
I want
Thanks.
And one of the reporters covering the crash said (paraphrasing), “I don’t want to zoom in too close because these may be friends of ours.” Well hello! This sure doesn’t seem to concern them when they film other scenes of tragedies or when the show bodies covered with sheets.
Notice I said "allows" not "mandates". And any passenger is as much at risk of being involved in a fatal collision during a chase
You are so right. Love your tag line, by the way!!
This was bound to happen to the chopperazzis sooner or later.
They go by the code: “Live dangerously, die young, make a goodlooking corpse.”
All to get a quasi-story about yet another car chase.
It was the inattention of the pilots involved. The news crews chose to follow the story.
If your logic holds, then you’d better hope you are never in an accident and a news crew does something stupid to injure or kill themselves. You’d be liable.
Well, if it's any comfort, it's a pretty safe bet that the camera guy and talkers who went down at least went down doing what they liked, and that was living on the edge. People should be free to live on the edge.
Amen.
A lot of what I see here sounds like "Pick-a-little-talk-a-little" in "The Music Man." Bunch of complacent hens scandalized by some barnyard outrage. These people died doing what they loved to do. They lived dangerously, God bless them. Unlike hens.
Much safer & yet, still very exciting, n'est pa?
I heard they were considering charging the driver in the chase with these deaths. Unbelievable if the DA does.
That is like charging him with the death of someone who has a heart attack watching the chase on tv.
No chase, roadblock on one end, ramming car on the other.
The day may come, FRiend, when we'll be glad to have guys who live in the tradition of the ones that went down in those helicopters. It's GOOD to have private news agencies covering (literally) events from the sky. Otherwise we leave ourselves WIDE OPEN to cover-ups and abuse. I dislike the media's political bias as much as the next guy. But am not naive enought to think what took its place in the name of "public safety" would be an improvement. Gov't-agency-approved press releases are a whole hell of a lot more dangerous than the prospect of a helicopter crashing into a mall while covering a riot.
Flying a helicopter for a living, or videoing events in hairy situations, takes a personality of a person who likes being on the edge. The pilots value their lives as much as any normal person -- they're not suicidial, which is why these accidents are and will always be relatively rare. Those guys up there know that if they screw up, they die. Only idiot groundbound penguins assume they don't.
Thank God for people who like living on the edge because without them, we'd be no better than domesticated dairy cows.
I like your post. The local helicopter newschopper pilots have always seemed like nice guys. I have seen reports of missing people and the helicopter pilots will end up looking in an area that the police haven’t looked yet and found the missing person. Honestly, I have always had much more problems with the reporters on the ground. In the end these are still people that viewers were familiar with and it is a sad event.
Wow, bad deal.
I definitely agree, and I think these guys are necessary out there. Helicopter news guys were the ones who caught a Dallas cop on camera pistol-whipping a handcuffed suspect.
No irony from me, I don’t watch the chases. I watched about 5 minutes of the OJ chase and that was it. The chases are one of the big reasons I don’t watch TV news, because the TV comes first and there frequently isn’t any news.
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