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Prosecutors seek 25 years in prison for deadly Kansas hoax
Federal prosecutors are seeking a 25-year prison sentence for a California man who made a hoax call that led police to fatally shoot a Kansas man following a dispute between online gamers.
[...] Barriss faces sentencing Friday in federal court in Wichita for making the false report resulting in a death. He has pleaded guilty to 51 charges related to fake calls and threats across the country.
The defense is seeking a 20-year prison sentence.
Sentencing is set for March 29.
Previously: Swatted: Police Kill Innocent Man in Kansas
Related: Gamers Use Police Hoax to Lash Out at Opponents
Swatter Just Prankster?
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Swatter Who Caused a Death in Kansas Likely Faces at Least 20 Years in Prison
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There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @10:59AM (11 children)
Are you implying that SWAT-team tactics are not (partly) designed to provoke terror in their targets?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday March 02 2019, @11:33AM (9 children)
Come on, you need to be more concrete than that. Scary movies are designed to provoke terror in their targets.
Obviously, you mean here illegal violence and intimidation designed to provoke terror. But even then, that counts a lot of stuff. For example, if a neighborhood dispute escalates to the point that one party ambushes and assaults another with intent to terrorize and intimidate, it's still not terrorism. Oxford claims the definition [oxforddictionaries.com] is:
Feels kind of weak to me since non-political aims can escalate to that point as well. For example, the Tokyo subway sarin (nerve gas) attack [wikipedia.org] was attributed by Wikipedia authors to:
If we take that assertion (uncited) at face value, it wouldn't be inherently political. There's the tactics of delaying a police investigation, not particularly political and sparking the apocalypse doesn't seem a political act to me, but YMMV.
My view is that organized, large scale, and/or persistent attacks on civilian targets (which can't be construed as genuine military targets in some active war) would be a better choice for determining terrorism. That definition doesn't depend on beliefs of the perpetrators, say whether they're East Alaskan separatists pursuing a political agenda or someone doing it for kicks. It doesn't depend on instilling a particular emotion in its targets, to deal with weird cases where say someone thinks killing a bunch of people is helping them and didn't have an intent to cause fear. And it ignores the sometimes nasty conflicts small groups can get into with each other.
In this case, we have an individual who has committed dozens of fraudulent 911 calls and put a lot of peoples' lives at risk (qualifies as attacks to me). It's not paramilitary, but it is pretty large scale and persistent, if my impression is true. That strikes me as terrorism (though not necessarily satisfying the legal definition) even if the person in question did it to get back at people from games he played.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @12:31PM (8 children)
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Saturday March 02 2019, @12:41PM (7 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @01:02PM (4 children)
polis = city
politēs = citizen
politikos = of, for, or relating to citizens
How is making a decision like starting the apocalypse anything but political?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @01:22PM
Replying to myself as to the contradiction in your phrasing:- an apolitical collapse is by definition not something that could be "sparked" by a human.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 02 2019, @04:58PM (2 children)
You can play that game with anything remotely relevant to cities/citizens/people. The weather is political in a similar fashion - though nobody does anything about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @05:45PM (1 child)
No. The weather is apolitical, anthropogenic climate change is political while apocalypse literally means revelation. [etymonline.com] Your usage of initiating a catastrophic event must be political but I just found the phrase amusing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 03 2019, @03:34PM
I guess I swam into a school of red herring.
Except, of course, when it's not.
(Score: 4, Informative) by purdy on Saturday March 02 2019, @01:08PM (1 child)
The domestic terrorism charges stem from Swautistic's calling in a bomb threat to the FCC to disrupt the net neutrality vote.
Threat of violence...Check
Political aim...Check
That'll get you a domestic terrorism charge and rightly so.
Relevant links:
https://www.theverge.com/us-world/2017/12/14/16777178/fcc-net-neutrality-vote-evacuation [theverge.com]
(Complete with video of the police searching the FCC conference room.)
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/01/serial-swatter-swautistic-bragged-he-hit-100-schools-10-homes/ [krebsonsecurity.com]
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday March 02 2019, @01:17PM
criminally stupid , is still criminal...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @04:20PM
Terrorism has a very particular definition, please educate yourself.