Criminal Law Course @ Moritz College of Law

Does (or should) Ohio have a "duty to aid" statute like Wisconsin?

Here is a research (or advocacy) assignment/question for the long weekend:

Does (or should) Ohio have a "duty to aid" statute like Wisconsin?

Here is a related question to consider: If you were to be tasked with drafting such a statute for a state's legislature to consider, what provisions of the Wisconsin approach would you preserve and what provisions might you want to tweak?

For anyone eager to do some more (totally optional) reading on this interesting topic, consider checking out an article in the Spring 2010 issue of the Georgia Law Review by Ken Levy, which is titled "Killing, Letting Die, and the Case for Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism."

UPDATE:  Here is a sad story via CNN about what sounds like a case like a New York version of the Jones case in 2010.  The piece is headlined "Girl, 4, weighed 15 pounds at death," and starts this way:

The mother of a 4-year-old girl found dead in her Brooklyn home Thursday morning was charged Friday with second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child, according to police.

Marchella Pierce weighed just 15 pounds and had marks on her hands and ankles when police found her unconscious in her family's apartment, according to CNN affiliate WABC-TV.

The offense grading problem in another setting

In light of our discussion of different grades of homicide (and in the wake of our Joe Wolvie hypo from a few weeks ago), folks might be interested in this new article by a colleague from the journal Criminal Law and Philosophy entitled "Grading Arson."  Here is the abstract of the article:

Criminalizing arson is both easy and hard.  On the substantive merits, the conduct of damaging property by fire uncontroversially warrants criminal sanction. Indeed, punishment for such conduct is overdetermined, as the conduct threatens multiple harms of concern to the criminal law: both damage to property and injury to people.  Yet the same multiplicity of harms or threats that makes it easy to criminalize "arson" (in the sense of deciding to proscribe the underlying behavior) also makes it hard to criminalize "arson" (in the sense of formulating the offense(s) that will address that behavior).

This article asks whether adopting one or more arson offenses is the best way for criminal law to address the conduct in question, or whether that conduct is more properly conceptualized, criminalized, and punished as multiple distinct offenses.

The article is pretty dense reading, and perhaps it is not a good use of a scarce time to read the article in full.  But this concluding sentence from the article has a message very pertinent to our homicide discussions: "Categories or formulations inherited from prior generations may even cause more harm than good if they become reified to the extent that our conceptualizations of crime become inseparable from the vernacular description or particular conduct the existing categories happen to describe, obscuring the ability to recognize each category's underlying purpose and function." 

If you can understand this final sentence from the article, you are already ahead of the game as we head into a review of the history and modern doctrines of grading homicide.