Lawyer Claims Woman Can’t Prove She Didn’t Actually Want To Be Set On Fire

[KamaAina]

Not The Onion!!

http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/01/lawyer-claims-woman-cant-prove-she-didnt-actually-want-to-be-set-on-fire/

In what is perhaps the strangest and most audacious claim ever made in court before, a lawyer for a New York University student accused of setting a sleeping female classmate on fire claims that there is actually no “proof” that the victim didn’t want to be set on fire.

The student, 20-year-old Jaime Castano, was unquestionably involved, as he filmed himself setting fire to the female student’s bed in his dorm room. When she wakes up screaming, set on fire, he can be hear singing, psychotically delighting in her terror.

Castano’s attorney, Alyssa Gamliel, said that the prosecution won’t “be able to prove that [the victim] was not sort of participating in some of this activity,” the New York Daily News explained.

The victim was intoxicated when she had been lit on fire. She was burned on her torso, but managed to survive. Still, Gamliel claims that she wanted to be burned.

[shenmue]

1. ...

[PoliticAverse]

2. Had they offered her client a plea bargain that was refused? n/t

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

3. Set the lawyer on fire.

Since obviously simply claiming you 'didn't want to be set on fire' doesn't mean just that.

[uppityperson]

4. Linked article, wtf?

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/nyu-burn-victim-drunk-participated-attorney-article-1.2090164

The attorney suggested that the victim’s torso burns got infected only because she failed to take care of the “minor” injury she had, possibly a result of her “continued behavior of intoxication.”

So it is her own fault? WTF? Asses.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

5. It is for situations like this that the formulation "reasonable doubt" was invented, I think.

Yes, I am a mathematician, and if pressed I will admit that I cannot formally derive the fact that she did not want to be set on fire in her sleep from the axioms of set theory.

However, I would still vote to convict based on the guess that, on the balance of probabilities, she probably wanted to obey rule 0.

[dissentient]

6. Wow, a new trend in criminal defense? "How do you know the guy didn't want to be killed anyway?"

"You can't prove my client wasn't performing a service and that the guy didn't ask for it!"