I’m so outraged–suppose I fire a gun into a crowd and kill John Smith. Am I innocent of murder unless the DA can prove that I intended to murder Mr. John Smith?
That’s exactly the kind of reasoning, it seems to me, behind the latest outrage in the NH phone-jamming scandal. James Tobin’s lawyers claim that he’s innocent of telephone “harassment” because–even though maybe he should have known Democrats might feel emotional distress if folks jammed their phone lines on Election Day–Tobin’s real “intent” wasn’t to make anybody feel bad at all.
Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say here but I did just write up the whole story at Blue Hampshire–some of the comments there are from people who were there, talking about what it felt like to get phone-jammed. In better phone-jamming news (thanks to Frank and to Ri and to Bill for all emailing me the link) today’s NY Times has an editorial urging a real (not Gonzales-led) investigation of the phone-jamming. 
1 response so far ↓
1 Betsy Devine // Sep 18, 2007 at 3:44 am
If my shooting-into-the-crowd example seems unclear, what I’m talking about is whether or not a reasonable person would have foreseen bad results from a certain action.
In fact, I think the common law would hold Mr. Tobin to an even higher standard, because he was a professional politician–he had been making a living at it for years. Tobin had a very detailed and accurate idea of what goes on at Election Day party headquarters when people are working their socks off to get out the vote after a long, hard-fought campaign.
And so do I!