Posted on 05/25/2011 10:13:46 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
WOBURN (CBS/AP) – A jury found Mark Kerrigan not guilty of manslaughter Wednesday in the 2010 death of his father, but found him guilty on the lesser charge of assault and battery.
Mark Kerrigan was charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of his 70-year-old father, Daniel Kerrigan. He faced up to 20 years in prison.
Sentencing will be Thursday at 9 a.m. He remains in custody.
A jury in Woburn Superior Court deliberated a little over 12 hours Monday and Tuesday.
Deliberations resumed Wednesday morning. A verdict was reached around 11:30 a.m.
Prosecutors claimed Kerrigan caused his father’s death during an altercation at the family’s home in Stoneham.
He was accused of grabbing his father around the neck with such force that he broke cartilage in his father’s larynx and triggered heart failure.
Kerrigan’s lawyers said Daniel Kerrigan died because he had severely clogged coronary arteries.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.cbslocal.com ...
So, he assaults and batters his father, which results in a fatal heart attack, and he's not guilty of manslaughter - HUH?????
Nancy says that the family believes that he had nothing to do with their father’s death. Yeah, right.
And that the father never would have wanted any of this. What, getting killed? I agree.
The more you peel back the layers of the lives of sports “heroes”, the more screwed up you find them to be.
WHY MEEEE????
How could this not result in a manslaughter conviction? Were there extenuating circumstances? I don't understand.
A couple of reasons.
1. It’s Assachusetts.
2. The Kerrigans are useless pieces of human trash. It’s obvious to everyone except them that Mark essentially killed his father.
They all need a bullet in the head.
Nothing’s ever easy. In this case, it is probably just a guess that broken neck cartilage triggered a heart attack. Proving that, especially if there is preexisting coronary heart disease, and in a case of severe stress, like an argument, is very hard to do.
Likewise, cartilage is very hard to break, the most common reason for that being brittle is substantial consumption of hard liquor for some years, which is also physically debilitating.
All told, the jury reached a decision that was appropriate.
I, IMHO, disagree. Mark Kerrigan’s actions had a definate impact on the death of his father. Involuntary Manslaughter would have been an appropriate finding. There are plenty of precedents for that finding in criminal law.
Yes, agreed. But a jury can only find on the charges before them. If they were not offered involuntary manslaughter, they couldn’t convict him of it.
This happens a lot when prosecutors roll the dice, because they correctly assume that if a jury are given three choices, they will tend to go for the middling one out of “benefit of the doubt”. In this case, the middle, correct one would have been involuntary manslaughter.
Just like several of the posters, here, though, if they are presented just two choices, and because they know that the son-in-law grabbed him around the neck, they vie for the harsher sentence, even though it is not fully supported by the evidence, rather than letting the offender go, because they knew that he had at least committed a criminal assault, for which he should be punished.
It’s jury psychology. But in this case, the prosecutor rolled the dice and lost. This happens a lot. Juries are a fickle bunch.
I’m confused. Did I miss something when I read that he had been charged with involunary manslaughter? If that was written correctly, then why did not the jury have the involunary manslaughter charge as an option?
That was my mistake. I originally believed that he faced a more serious charge than involuntary manslaughter, and an assault and battery charge.
However, since he faced IM and AB, the jury felt doubt that not even involuntary manslaughter had been proven. So the defense must have established that he was pretty much a walking dead man, and that grabbing around the neck, even with cartilage damage, could not be directly associated with his heart attack, any more than the stress of the argument.
Still, in that case, the onus is on the medical examiner to establish a connection.
I guess it’s a good thing I was not on that jury. I would have voted for IM.
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