First Page
1059
Abstract
Offenses against the person-(a) Homicide: Parties.-Because of an asserted lack of intention to commit homicide, two persons asked the state supreme court in Eager v. State to reverse their convictions of involuntary manslaughter for allegedly, while intoxicated, killing a pedestrian with an automobile driven by one and directed and aided by the other. In affirming, it would have been enough to dispose of this contention to invoke the statutory provision that "manslaughter is the unlawful killing of another without malice, either express or implied, which may be... involuntary, but in the commission of some unlawful act,"' to call attention to the fact that the killing here was done in the commission of the unlawful act of driving an automobile upon a public highway while under the influence of an intoxicant, and to cite precedents to the effect that involuntary manslaughter occurs when, without intending death or bodily harm, one accidentally causes the death of another by an unlawful act. But the court went further to observe that the conduct of these defendants in deliberately and consciously doing an unlawful act, the probable although unintended consequence of which was death, implied such a high degree of conscious and willful recklessness that even convictions of murder in the second degree would have been justified.
Recommended Citation
Robert E. Kendrick,
Criminal Law and Procedure -- 1960 Tennessee Survey,
13 Vanderbilt Law Review
1059
(1960)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol13/iss4/14