Interviewer: What are some examples of misdemeanor and felony Homicide? Glen Malia: There's lots of different examples of homicide. You have the intentional homicides sometimes classified as murder. The murders, which are the intentional acts. Then you have the unintentional ones, whether it's a reckless or reckless conduct leads to a homicide. Those are usually classified as manslaughter. Perfect examples, you actually may have a homicide through a person driving drunk who runs over somebody and kills them. That could be a reckless homicide. Reckless usually, the unintentional type homicides. There is another, if you engage in extremely reckless conduct and someone gets killed by that reckless conduct, that will constitute a criminal offense. Displaying a Depraved Indifference towards Human Life Constitutes Homicide Charges For example, if you're in a crowded theater or on a crowded morning you shoot a gun into the air, that is a reckless homicide. There's a couple different classifications. One of is basically depraved indifference to human life. If you do something that shows that you don't really care whether someone dies or not, that constitutes a homicide. Actually, that can also end up being a murder as opposed to manslaughter. Then you obviously have the classic murder cases where someone goes and kills someone, and then you have the higher level murder cases if you kill a police officer while you're committing a crime, then that's a higher level murder charge than if you killed somebody else, because we give police officers that special status as police officers. The Ability to Be Convicted of a Homicide Charge Even if You Didn’t Physically Commit Murder is Referred to as Felony Murder Then you also have the ability; The ability to be actually convicted of a murder charge or a homicide charge, even if you didn't physically do the conduct that led to the homicide, and that's referred to as a felony murder if you and one or other people are engaged in a felony and someone gets killed during that felony, everybody that's engaged in committing that felony can be charged with felony murder. That's another level, that's another type of homicide. There are a Number of Charges that Fall Within the Sex Offenses Category Interviewer: Do sex offenses include rape and sexual battery and things of that nature? Glen Malia: Yes. There's a number of charges that fall within sex offense categories. Obviously, everyone always thinks of the rape being a sex offense, but there's other things. There’s what they call forcible touching. That would be, although you don't actually rape the person and you may not even take their clothes off but you're touching the person's private parts without their permission. Then there's the indecent exposure type thing where maybe you're standing in your front window with the blinds up and having no clothes on and doing inappropriate things with yourself or with somebody else, the concept being that you're doing things for other people to see and doing it intentionally, exhibitionist, for example. Some Sex Crimes May Be Charged With Additional Offenses Such as Endangering the Welfare of a Child Some sex crimes can fall under a classification of, as opposed to being a sex crime, can fall into the classification of endangering the welfare of a child too without necessarily having sexual contact. One of the things that come into play, going back onto the rape charges, the rape charges, there's several different levels of rape. People think of the physical force where a man grabs a woman off the street and physically rapes her. Then there's a rape that occurs because the woman could not give consent. Now, you may have a situation where the person can't give consent because they're mentally retarded and/or the one you see a lot on the college levels, the woman is drunk and she can't give consent because she's drunk. Then you also have the rape that sometimes just referred to as statutory rape where the person is deemed by the law to be too young to give consent, so even though it may be completely consensual, because the person is too young to give consent, it's a crime.
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