There was a period of time about six years ago (as of writing this) when, in the United States, for some strange reason a lot of black people were harassing and often violently assaulting East Asian people. Yes, these assaults were extremely widespread, and for some strange reason were almost completely restricted to black people. (I have never heard a good explanation of why.)
Well, in one such case a young black man deliberately and purposefully (which he himself later admitted) ran at full speed against and pushed an 84-year-old elderly Asian man, extremely violently knocking him to the ground. The elderly man died of his wounds a couple of days later.
In the court trial, which lasted a whopping 5 years for some reason, he admitted having deliberately assaulted the man, and he admitted that his actions directly caused his death.
This is a textbook and quintessential clear-cut case of so-called second-degree murder: Killing someone in the process of committing a crime against that person, also called non-premeditated murder. (First-degree murder is when the perpetrator planned it ahead of time.)
So after a whopping five years of trial the jury convicted him of... "involuntary manslaughter".
Let that sink in for a moment.
Normally involuntary manslaughter means that someone dies of an accident that was your fault due to negligence. In other words, there was no intent to commit a crime, and the victim was completely random and non-targeted, and the death only happened by accident because of your negligence. Say, for example, that you park your car somewhere, but forget to engage the handbrake, you go somewhere, and meanwhile your car starts rolling downhill and causes someone's death: If it's deemed that you were negligent by not using the handbrake, you could be convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
If you deliberately and purposefully assault someone in order to cause harm, particularly if you do so with extreme aggression and force (as was very clearly the case here, as there is security camera footage of the incident), and your assault directly causes the victim to die, that's absolutely not "involuntary manslaughter". It's textbook second-degree murder.
The difference in jailtime between the two is very significant.
It is pretty much undeniable that if the perpetrator had been white, he would have been convicted of second-degree murder, perhaps even first-degree (for some reason judges rarely stop the wrong category of murder being applied by a jury in these cases), and the jury only convicted him of the significantly lesser crime because he is black.
You can see a video about this incident for example here.
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