What purpose, then, is served?

This morning, as I drove out of the drive,  I looked across the road to see fields of purple lovegrass, covered in dew, made glowing white by the rising sun. It was indeed awesomely beautiful, triggering remembrances of some of the old descriptions of heaven. Sometimes beauty can bring us to a state of awe, enthralled, bedazzled, mesmerized. I recommend trying to begin and end your day with such an experience. It’s a far better beginning than by reading the  morning paper, which may contain such items as finding that the third degree murder conviction of Mohamed Noor has been overturned by  the Minnesota Supreme Court. According to the Star Tribune:

The court's unanimous ruling written by Chief Justice Lorie Gildea focused on the mental state necessary for the legal standard of a "depraved mind," defined as a "generalized indifference to human life."

The state's highest court said such a state cannot exist when a defendant's conduct is aimed at a particular person. The ruling affirmed what Noor's lawyers have claimed since trial — that third-degree murder didn't apply because his actions were focused on a single person.

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The Minnesota Statute is two paragraphs long. The second makes sense. The purpose of the first paragraph is, in my humble opinion, obscured in incomprehensible language. The individual words might make sense, but not when strung together. Here’s the paragraph:

(a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.

Perhaps it’s because my college degree is in English, and I am not a lawyer, that I am deeply troubled by, to the point of not being able to assign a meaning to, the phrases "by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life,...”

According to one law firm’s web site, "Examples of depraved mind murder include violently driving an automobile ², the accidental discharge of a gun during a fight³, and Mohammed Noor’s widely publicized charge of shooting a woman while on duty as a police officer.”

Now that the Minnesota Supreme Court has eliminated the third example, I continue to struggle with the question of what does it mean to be violently driving an automobile (is that reckless driving?) and how does one accidentally discharge a gun during a fight? What if one’s opponent causes the discharge? Was it a depraved mind that brought a gun to where  there might be a fight? What is an example of a “generalized indifference to human life?” Is that like weapons of mass destruction that no one can find?

I’ve known many lawyers over the years and often been fascinated by their ability to split hairs at the subatomic scale. As far as I’m concerned, Minnesota’s use of the phrases “evincing a depraved mind” and “act eminently dangerous to others” belong with Schrödinger's cat and not in the realm of jurisprudence. Let’s not even get started on how, per the second paragraph, there’s supposed to be any sort of equivalency between sentenced to "not more than 25 years [in prison] or to payment of a fine of not more than $40,000, or both.”

The Murder of William Remington

By Howard Nemerov

It is true, that even in the best-run state

Such things will happen; it is true,

What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate

Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue

But by the smoke, and not for thought alone

It punishes, but for the thing that’s done.

And yet there is the horror of the fact,

Though we knew not the man. To die in jail,

To be beaten to death, to know the act

Of personal fury before the eyes can fail

And the man die against the cold last wall

Of the lonely world—and neither is that all:

There is the terror too of each man’s thought,

That knows not, but must quietly suspect

His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught

To take an attitude merely correct;

Being frightened of his own cold image in

The glass of government, and his own sin,

Frightened lest senate house and prison wall

Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high

Look faintly smiling down and seem to call

A crime the welcome chance of liberty,

And any man an outlaw who aggrieves

The patriotism of a pair of thieves.

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