That people do monumentally stupid things is almost definitional. To err is human, and that’s putting it kindly. One such stupid thing, as it turns out, is inviting people to hit you. Charging $5 for the pleasure just adds to the aura of stupidity.
Tiffany Startz, 22, put up her money and took her punch. Aspiring rapper John ‘Fatboy’ Powell, 25, took the punch to the face. Now he’s dead and she’s going to trial. You can’t make this stuff up.
From ABC News :
John “Fatboy” Powell, 25, was attending and performing at a party with his band Krazy Killaz last September when he accepted a $5 party bet to be punched in the face by a woman.
A few minutes after Tiffany Startz, 22, had delivered a punch to his face, Powell passed out. He was taken to Provena Saint Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Ill., where he died.
An autopsy on Powell showed that an artery burst in his neck and that he died from a brain hemorrhage caused by blunt force trauma.
Don’t you love the wacky names they come up with for bands? I wonder why the Morons didn’t make the final cut.
Now, Startz is on trial and facing charges of battery and reckless conduct. Her lawyer Ira Goldstein said, “There’s nothing reckless here. What she did was intentional. [Powell] said he would accept the punch from her.”
Startz is 5-foot-5′ and weighs 142 pounds and Goldstein said, “She’s a young girl with no training in body building or karate or fighting or anything like that.”“There was no animosity, no maliciousness,” added Goldstein, “just a stupid party stunt that went terribly wrong. No one anticipated this.”
Goldstein moved to dismiss the charges, arguing that this was consensual conduct. Stupid, but consensual. County Judge Edward Burmila refused. Not surprisingly, Fatboy’s mother was relieved.
Theresa Guy could barely breathe after a Will County judge refused to dismiss charges against a Joliet woman Friday who is accused of killing Guy’s son in a party game gone wrong.
Guy cried and hugged family and friends, and she tried to catch her breath. She knows the 22-year-old Startz could still be acquitted at trial, but the case isn’t over after the ruling from Judge Edward Burmila.
“She can’t walk away today,” Guy said.
Walk away from what? From your rapper-wannabe son’s need to prove he’s a tough guy by being punched in the face by some girl for $5? While I can understand a mother’s heartbreak about the death of her son, that doesn’t extend to absolving him of his stupidity in this incredibly idiotic scenario.
Startz’s lawyer, Ira Goldstein, makes the only reasonable point in this whole sordid mess, that as stupid as this entire affair may be, there is no crime when the conduct is consensual. Consent is clearly a defense to battery, and stupid isn’t reckless, particularly when there is nothing to suggest that a single punch, even one to the face, had a likelihood of causing death.
That Judge Burmila failed to dismiss is inexplicable, short of the basic judicial inclination to avoid making difficult decisions and earning his pay. It’s so much easier to push it off to a jury, so that any residual anger will fall on their shoulders rather than his.
This case, and indeed the entire scenario, is ridiculous, but for the fact that there’s a dead 25 year old. It’s not that young people are suddenly stupid today when they weren’t before. They’ve always taken foolish risks, and believed themselves to be invincible. It’s been going on forever.
What is different is the belief that every outcome demands a legal solution, that if someone dies, someone must be held accountable for it. Stupidity was once a sufficient explanation, but it has now become so deeply embedded into our lives that it’s no longer sufficient to explain why there’s a dead body on the ground.
The biggest question remaining is whether some legislator will latch onto this cause and propose Fatboy’s Law, prohibiting face punching at parties at $5 a pop. Only afterward will I concern myself with the potential for a face punching registry.
There’s little doubt that neither Startz nor Fatboy desired or anticipated any real harm coming from this momentary lulz. In the age of Jackass (1, 2 and 3D), this barely registers on the scale of pathetically stupid deeds. And it should be anticipated that even more idiotic stunts will be performed in the future, since the need to surpass the depth of yesterday’s stupidity seems unquenchable.
But does the criminal justice system have to participate in this downward spiral?
H/T Jonathan “Houdini” Turley
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What happens to lawyers when they “ascend” to the bench? Why do we suddenly lose all notion of justice and semblance of courage and the sense of what is right and wrong?
Do we become this afraid of “negative publicity” and punt the morally, ethically and legally correct decisions, thereby extending tragedies long beyond what they need to be, continuing the suffering?
This isn’t the first or only example of judicial cowardice. Trial courts are so reluctant to do anything that isn’t stare decisis. It’s such a shame and makes a mockery of the justice system.
There are as many reasons as there are judges, but at its core, I think there’s no external incentive to being a bold, strong judge. Take chances and be wrong, and someone will nail your judicial butt to the wall. Keep your head low and toe the line, and you get to the next level, or at least avoid having your puss on the front page of the papers. Avoid controversy and your robed pals will let you sit at their lunch table. Make too much noice and they want nothing to do with you. And of course, some are just weak, enjoying the robe because lawyers now laugh at their jokes and can’t call them “asshole” anymore. At least to their face.
I’ve had this talk with some friends who took the bench, and they look at me like I’m nuts, I just don’t get it.
I dunno about in the American jurisprudence, but there’s been a bit of back and forth on this in Canada. The rule is that consent is a defense to assault, but that consent is vitiated where injury is intended and is in fact caused. Most cases on point are this sort of thing — someone consents to being hit or to a fight, falls down and hits their head, and dies The question is whether harm was intended in the circumstances. IE: [Ed. Note: Link deleted. per rules.]
I don’t know as though it’s fair to say this kind of thing shouldn’t attract criminal liability. When you strike someone in the head, there’s a non-zero chance they’ll die from it. If you deliberately hit someone, and that chance of harm does actually materialize, I don’t think it should be open to say afterwards “oh well I didn’t MEAN to cause injury”
Yeah. We all know how it’s supposed to be. The problem is always how it is. Canada? Where is that?
In the USA we have a word for acts which cause unintended harms, we call them accidents, or at worst, torts.
By the way, how crazy is it to have a rule that one may consent to be hit, but can not consent to an injury caused by being struck? Why allow consent at all? Also, with respect to your last point, it is not certainly not that the hitter does not mean to cause injury, a mere touch causes legal injury (used to be called ‘trespass to the person’), it is that the hitter did not intend to cause the 1 in a million chance result of killing someone.