I am on vacation and using a phone to respond to comments, so I can’t give you the “War and Peace” version, but...
1) Strict Liability offenses—At English common law, which was adopted in the USA, there was no such thing as an “unintentional” crime. As America modernized, legislatures found the need to enact certain laws to penalize minor stuff, e.g., traffic violations and regulatory offenses. I don’t remember the Supreme Court case, but SCOTUS handed down a decision in the 60s or 70s that held that “strict liability” offenses were constitutional as long as the penalty attached to the crime was nominal, e.g., fines. For example, if I’m driving your car, which has an expired tag on it, it is NOT a defense in court that I did not know about the expired tag. I’m stuck paying the $25 fine. In short, in America we don’t put people in jail who do not possess some level of criminal intent.
2. Intent—Every crime has an intent element, and some have multiple intent elements. The crime of theft requires that I take someone else’s property with the specific intent to deprive that person of the property permanently. Example: If I mistakenly pick up the wrong luggage at the airport, I am innocent of theft on two grounds: first, I did not have a general criminal intent, because I thought the luggage was mine; second, obviously I also lacked the intent to convert the suitcase to my permanent possession. Example 2: I decide to take my neighbor’s new Corvette for a spin w/o tellingh him. Am I guilty of auto theft? No, because I intended to return the car. However, I am guilty of “unauthorized use” of the car, which is a general intent crime, i.e., just taking the car w/o authority is enough regardless of a “specific intent” to permanently steal the car.
Baldwin’s case—I will confess that I do not know every fact, but assuming that 1) Baldwin was uanaware of bullets being in the gun; and 2) Baldwin believed that the armorer checked the gun to ensure its safety, I don’t see any crime. Allow me to illustrate with some examples of involuntary manslaugher:
1) Person A drives down a residential, suburban street at 150 mph (in a 35 mph zone) and kills a kid who runs into the street to chase a ball. This is clearly involuntary manslaughter.
2) Person B leaves her baby in the car to go into the grocery store; she is gone for 45 minutes and the baby dies because it is 95 degrees out. This is also clearly involuntary manslaughter.
3) Alec Baldwin: Is an actor on the stage of a western where everybody on the set knows that he will be pointing and shooting a gun loaded with blanks and he proceeds to fire that gun and unwittingly kills a producer on the set because, unbeknowst to him, he was handed a prop gun with live ammo.
The test: If you, my friend, were a police officer and you witnessed Person A driving 150 mph on a suburban street BEFORE he hit the kid, would you have taken action to stop the driver? Answer: Hell yeah. If you were a police officer and you witnessed a young mom leave her baby in a hot car, would you immediately take action to stop it? Hell yeah. But.....If you, as a police officer, were watching Alec Baldwin’s actions on the set of “Rust,” would you have run out on the set and screamed: “Stop, this is reckless disregard for human life!” Answer: No, you would not. In fact, NOBODY on the set, including the victim, saw this coming. And that, in a nutshell, is why Baldwin did not commit the crime of involuntary manslaughter. There was no known, obvious risk of him pulling the trigger of the prop gun.
Analogies are a great way to educate but rarely the best way to argue a position because analogies can be easily countered with more analogies, often pitting the original tale against the teller with a cutting barb. I’m not going to attempt to do that with the drunk driving comparison. I’ll just say that not all cases of negligence or recklessness can be easily observed. Often a law enforcement officer would not perceive the danger until it was too late, even if watching something as it happens. For example, if someone were poisoned a police officer might be present but only become aware of the poison after an investigation.
You’ve given me a lot of food for thought. This is why Free Republic is such a great place to learn. Even if I’m not 100% persuaded by everything you’re claiming, I see that there is much more substance to it than I originally supposed. At the very least, you’ve demonstrated that investigating crimes requires paying huge attention to intent and not just the actions and results of those actions.
I still would like to find some confirmation and consensus on your claims about intent from a legal perspective. Some of my post-grad courses were focussed on law for business and education. They were not primarily about crime and punishment. But I’m surprised that nowhere in any of my educational or training experiences have I heard the legal position that there is no crime without intent. I realize, of course, intent is the major lynchpin in the prosecution of most crimes, and a couple of years of doing mock trials taught me a lot about that.
As far as Baldwin goes, I think the totality of the circumstances will come into play before this is fully resolved. But we’ll see.