ceywoozle replied to your post “Hi, you make pretty amazing metas, so I thought I could ask for your/or your follower’s insight. I am no law expert, but as far as I understood Sherlock did manslaughter (not murder) which would result in imprisonment for years, depending on the…
Why would it be manslaughter? It’s not accidental, there’s no case for diminished responsibility. I’m not a criminal law expert, but I think that in the UK, bringing a very illegal weapon to someone’s house and then shooting them with it would be a clear case for premeditated murder. As I said elsewhere I also think John would be arrested and potentially convicted as an accomplice to murder, because the gun is his. Though I could be missing something?
I can’t see that Sherlock would want to be on the run from the British authorities permanently, as he would be if he ducked out of the mission they were sending him on. Though you could argue that this might depend on whether Mycroft would back Sherlock against those authorities. Plus if the powers that be in Britain were holding criminal charges over John, that would be a clear motivation for Sherlock to do as asked.
you know, I do have a criminal barrister friend. worth asking him?
I’m not sure why PA’s reader thought that this would be manslaughter. Maybe a misunderstanding of what constitutes provocation under the law? (There are provocations that will switch a killing from murder to manslaughter. Including, if memory serves, imperfect self defense.) PA mentions a conversation she and I had about this- PA maintained that CAM’s threat to expose Mary to “people who hate her” was sufficiently direct to justify Sherlock’s murder of him as “defense of others.” I disagreed. We remain disagreed on the moral point, but I think PA conceded to my greater expertise on the legal point. 😉
It’s my opinion that the threat CAM made was sufficiently indirect and abstract that it cannot be treated as provocation in reducing the charge to manslaughter. Now, if this were in the US he’d have a good case for 2nd degree murder as opposed to 1st- 1st degree requires premeditation, which can technically occur just a few seconds before the act, but juries tend to be skeptical in the absence of evidence of pre-planning. The fact that he brought a gun to Appledore is going to count against him, of course, but he could make a good argument that his whole plan going tits up caused him to freak the fuck out.
If you asked your friend, I’d be interested to hear what they think. (I don’t know if the UK even has the same degrees of murder the US does?)
Also, I don’t see how John could possibly be accused of even being an accessory. The gun is unregistered and illegal, the only way to link it to him is if he opens his damn fool mouth and says it’s his. There has to be some evidence that he actually planned with Sherlock or assisted him in some way, and there just isn’t any.
Well, I don’t really disagree with you on the moral point, either, Linden. But I can imagine John being willing to shoot anyway. It is, after all, his wife, best friend and government at stake (because of him, incidentally).
But anyway, folks. Answer from a real-life (US) lawyer on the manslaughter/murder thing. I’d be interested to hear what Achray’s friend thinks, too.
(They might be able to tie the gun to John. He is presumably the one who normally cleans and loads the gun, so the interior parts and bullets in the clip probably bear his fingerprints and DNA, unless he or Sherlock have had the foresight to wear gloves when working on it. And in real life, they might well discover during ballistics testing that this is the same gun as the one that killed that cabbie back in the day—and that clearly wasn’t Sherlock.
I mostly mention this in hopes of fic.)