Gaborn said:
and all the charges you don't think would be appropriate ARE because a life guard doesn't have the power to assume someone is already dead, they have a duty to the people in the pool to respond to people who may be in distress and that INCLUDES people who happen to already be dead. By NOT doing so you're suggesting that it's ok for the life guard to make a judgment call whether they should bother to go after someone that may be in distress because they could already be dead.
1.) You can't charge someone with negligent homicide if their inaction didn't cause the person's death. Period. We have a long list of things people can get charged with, so that we can apply the appropriate charge to the crime.
2.) Saying it wasn't negligent homicide doesn't mean they don't have a duty to try help in any situation like this, and I never said otherwise. Again, this is you wanting me to have the opposite view on this whole thing from the view that you have, so that you can argue with someone.
3.) I'm not suggesting that's ok for a lifeguard to make such a judgement call. You're making that up and must have gone through some mental gymnastics to do so. No lifeguard should ever have that mindset. Trying to extrapolate that from my views on what qualifies for the specific charge of negligent homicide makes you look much less intelligent than I know you must be.
dojokun said:
Thrpe kid witnessed it and told the lifeguards. You're arguing that it's possible the kid waited until the lady was unsaveable before telling the lifeguards? I would think that a jury would not be convinced of that argument without proof. Common sense says he told right away.
I'm saying that I don't know. How long does it take for a 9-year-old boy to notice that a woman he has no association with has been gone for too long? I don't know. Maybe someone does. Your logic has no place in a court of law, though.
SapientWolf said:
Don't be silly. Girls don't have beards.
I don't think they believed that there was someone on the bottom of the pool, so they shrugged the kid off. The murky water was a safety hazard that should have been identified long before this incident, so that's not the only case of negligence here.
Not investigating the claim was clear and blatant negligence on the lifeguards' part. Even if there's someone at the pool who starts "crying wolf" a lot or something, you still need to investigate every time and address the problem by getting them banned from the pool, not by ignoring them.
Goodness, look at all the people arguing with me, none of which are arguing against the one point I made. It's surreal.