"Peter Duniho" wrote in message
...
Do you have an example in which the person killed was not involved in the
crime?

Not offhand. But surely the perpetrator of a violent felony would be *at
least* as responsible for the death (by accidental police fire) of a
bystander or of a victim as for the death of an accomplice. (If anything,
it's the application of felony-murder to the *accomplice's* death that seems
a little bit of a stretch.)

It is conceivable to me that the law considers an accomplice to be
foreseeably in danger, or that it would differentiate between a lawful
killing and an unlawful killing, but that a different standard would be
applied to the killing of a bystander.

Why wouldn't bystanders be deemed foreseeably endangered by an armed bank
robbery? Seems pretty foreseeable to me. A reasonable person feels
(justifiably) frightened to be in the middle of such a robbery, right?

Note also that this example applies only to a very narrow range of
situations, all of which involve criminal activities MUCH more serious
that an airspace violation.

Of course, but that wasn't the point of the discussion.

To support the claim that the pilot was *not* culpable for endangerment,
Greg proposed an analogy to a robber's responsibility for shots fired *at*
the robber. Greg claimed mistakenly that the robber lacks legal
responsibility for the consequences of those shots; I was merely showing
otherwise to rebut the implication of his analogy.

In any case, I also don't feel that the two situations are analogous from
an ethical standpoint (though, they may be from the current regulatory
standpoint). That is, in the case of the commission of a crime, even a
robbery, deadly force is generally authorized

And in the case of penetrations all the way into the FRZ, deadly force is
also authorized, and is well known to be authorized. Hence, its use--whether
the policy is reasonable or not--is a readily foreseeable consequence of
such an incursion, and thus a readily foreseeable source of danger to the
pilot, his passenger, and the folks below him.

--Gary