In season 3 of 24, President Palmer's very duplicitous wife, Sherry goes to visit the wife of a former political ally now turned against him. The former ally is old and frail and takes many medications. He accidentally comes upon the meeting and gets very angry, triggering a heart attack. The two wifes can easily give him the medicine, but decide not to do so, mostly due to Sherry pressuring the wife.
When president Palmer find out what happens he calls his wife a murder. But I'm not sure that's the case--at least as a matter of law.
In law school we study the old common law, which is mostly worthless because the common law is now entirely replaced by statute. At common law, however, you generally have no duty to save. If a world class swimmer walks by a drowning child and decides he wants to watch the kid drown, then at common law he can without legal consequence.
Maybe statutes have changed this result. I found Com v. Pestinikas, 421 Pa.Super 371 (1998), a case where a Pennsylvania court upheld the conviction of the Pestinikas, a couple unrelated to the victim who were supposed to care for him but failed to feed him or give him medicine.The court, while recognizing that a stranger refusing food and medicine to a person does not give rise to a murder claim, still upheld the conviction in Pestinikas because the Pestinikases were contractually obligated to provide food and medicine.
but I think for the most part, american law generally has stayed the same on this point--there is no duty to save.
Now, the wife was related, so she may have had a duty to save, but it seems Sherry didn't.
The only two other ways I can see that Sherry may be guilty of murder:1. she made the former supporter mad constituted creating a life-threatening condition such that she needed to save him from it, or 2. she interferred/discouraged the wife from saving the supporter making her some sort of accomplice to the murder of the wife or otherwise guilty of murder.
On the question of creating a life-threatening condition--I wonder whether you take your victim as you find them (like you would in tort law) or whether the condition has to be objectively life-threatening to normal fit people. I would assume the latter, because we would want the perpetrator of the crime to have the mens rea, before punishing them. If I'm correct, then Sherry would still have no duty to save.
My inclination then is to think that what Sherry did was not murder.
This is supposed to be L.A., so maybe I'll have to do some California-specific research.
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