Absolutely not defending this guy, but I always get curious when news reporting refers to chemicals in the most alarmist way possible, so I looked around a bit.
Turns out we’re talking about sleeping pills of the anithistamine variety. Which is still a horrible thing to dose someone with, but I imagine a lot of people read “sleeping pills” and think benzos or ludes.
ETA: Found some more details.
The last contaminated coffee that Kozlowski had brewed for the victim was analyzed and was found to contain 127 milliliters of Diphenhydramine. A recommended dosage of the drug for adults is between 25-50mg.
My only thought was what was the dose and what is the LD50 for what ever pills they are? Regardless, repeated instances of 8x the dose seems potentially fatal, definitely harmful and worthy of a many year, 24/7/365 sentence. :-/
So according to the comments in the article the sleeping pills were diphenhydramine. Per the linked article a fatal dose is on the order of 20-40 mg/kg and a typical dose is on the order of 25-50 mg. Assuming one pill is the minimum dose and she weighed 50 kg, then he’d need to put 40-80 pills in her coffee.
One pill could have put her in the hospital or killed her if she’d fallen asleep driving, though.
It’s irrelevant, though, since he plead guilty to a lesser charge and it’s not clear that he was doing anything beyond being a petty, vindictive loser. Poisoning someone’s coffee just to make them sick is only marginally better than trying to kill them; the fucker should still be spending more time in jail.
Most of the people on this list either took more of the stuff or were very young, but this stuff is toxic in large quantities and the hubby knew it. He just didn’t carry the one and she lived.
I see it as more nefarious than that. What can someone that vile get up to when his victim is unnaturally asleep?
Thanks for posting research. I get a bit paranoid about how my Google search history will look if I keep looking up research topics to comment in threads like this… And it’s kind of hard to separate what is reasonable to worry about from stuff we needn’t worry about…
Yeah, if you try to shoot someone with a gun without knowing it only has blanks in it, that’s no defense. “I tried to murder them, but failed because I used a harmless weapon, so I shouldn’t be punished!”
Ah, you are inadvertently setting this up as a TV court drama / law school exercise.
IANAL so I’m speculating, but I think in your scenario it comes down to what the defendant knew and intent and the exact wording of the controlling state statues and subsequent case law… If he knew they were blanks then it wouldn’t be attempted murder (though still assault, and maybe assault with a deadly weapon depending on the the state’s exact laws), but it he thought the gun was loaded with real bullets, or could be, then it could be attempted murder. But it could get even more complicated, because blanks can cause death if you are close enough (cf Jon-Erik Hexum), so if he was close enough and did know there were blanks it could still be attempted murder.
State law varies, though, as does selective prosecution based on wealth and ethnicity. :-/
It’s certainly not clear he knew or cared what a “safe” dose would have been. He put as many pills in her coffee as he thought he could get away with, and it’s likely he did so with the intent of causing illness or death.
Dropping their wedding photo album in the shredder would be “petty.” Posting nasty messages on Facebook would be “petty.” This was straight up assault, if not attempted murder.
That’s looking even at the wrong intent. It’s not whether or not you intended to kill or didn’t. You intended to point a gun.
Closer to this case, if you snuck fish oil into my food withe the purported intent of improving my health, it doesn’t matter, because you intentionally tampered with my food. My allergic reaction doesn’t care about what you meant it for. It didn’t get there by accident. You deliberately put something in I didn’t agree to or ask for.
But as a woman, it’s frustrating but not surprising that some people treat violation of consent as an intellectual exercise as some people in this thread seem to be doing.
A metaphor for this would be if Prince Charming here had hit her over the head with a stick. It knocked her out, but didn’t cause permanent injury because there was a crack in it. Clearly, attempted murder/aggravated assault, but we’ve got people on this thread wondering whether the wood was oak or maple…
Don’t you understand? You are supposed to be so apoplectic and enraged that no thought can take up space in your brain except that of how horrible this guy is and what a lenient sentence he got. Because that’s what’s productive: impotent rage that paralyzes the mind; we need more of that in today’s world. All other curiosities your grey matter might needlessly generate must be supressed.
And it’s kind of hard to separate what is reasonable to worry about from stuff we needn’t worry about…
