If there’s any common denominator in the commission of crimes, it’s that they reflect a terrible error in judgment.  Not all, but most.  Here’s a pretty good example.

Andrew John Bornen, 16, was lying handcuffed and face-down on a busy suburban roadway in the Ipswich suburb of Brassall when he was struck and killed by a car on February 7, 2009.

His heart, aorta and pulmonary trunk were ruptured and he died before an ambulance arrived six minutes later.  Officers had forced the Ipswich teen down after reports a youth was armed with a machete in the area.

However, Andrew was only carrying a baseball bat when he was confronted by police and an inquest found he had not been acting aggressively.

Maybe the car that ran over Bornen would have seen him, lying there handcuffed, face down, in the roadway, but for the headlights of the police care shining into the eyes of oncoming traffic. 

State Coroner Michael Barnes called the police conduct “a terrible error in judgment.”  Ding, ding, ding.  Where have we heard that before?  For once, the government felt compassion.

The director of public prosecutions, Tony Moynihan SC, said he had carefully considered evidence that would be admissible in any trial.

‘‘There is no suggestion that the police officers were acting unlawfully or not in the execution of their duty in arresting Andrew Bornen who was intoxicated and armed in public,’’ Mr Moynihan said in a statement.

‘‘Given the momentary opportunity the police officers had to assess and act in this situation, the efforts made to alert the driver of the vehicle and the contribution of the driver of the vehicle which ran over and killed Mr Bornen, there is no reasonable prospect of a conviction.’’

Oddly, that rationale applies with enormous frequency to terrible errors in judgment.  People are confronted with unusual, even volatile situations with which they are ill-prepared to assess, and are constrained to make snap decisions about their behavior.  Like whether to stand, run or shoot. 

Police are trained to do police-type stuff.  Regular people are trained to do fingerpainting, sometimes physics.  They aren’t trained to handle threats, violence, potentially dangerous conditions that may threaten life and limb.  Hard as it is to imagine, people find themselves in difficult, sometimes confounding situations, demanding immediate reactions.  Sometimes, their choice is a mistake. Often, they can’t quite explain why they made a particular choice, except that something had to be done and they responded. 

Sometimes, when confronted by these crazy scenarios, they make terrible errors in judgment.  This is one of the reasons I urge everyone to have a criminal defense lawyer standing by their side at all times.  Unfortunately, not everyone heeds my advice.

Of course, in most instances, the decision made in the heat of the moment, under the most arduous and unanticipated of circumstances, will be reviewed at enormous leisure and with deep deliberation by people who have the luxury of sitting at a desk or on a bench, and can decide whether the choice made is the best one possible.  The law demands much of us, good judgment included.

For the two of you who haven’t realized it as yet, this terrible error in judgment occurred in Australia, where everything happens upside down.  Don’t think you can adopt this argument for your clients, that their choice was merely a terrible error in judgment and not the product of an evil person.  That only works if you can utter the argument in an Aussie accent.  And if your client happens to be a cop.

H/T Turley