There is. I think the difference is that in “negligence causing death” you never intended to cause harm or commit a crime, but death resulted through your disregard for other people, not through your malice towards them. It escalates to murder if you intended to cause harm and that harm ended up being death. We still have “first degree” and “second degree” murder, distinguishing between premeditated and spur-of-the-moment murder. “Manslaughter” covers people who were, extremely emotionally affected at the time or provoked.
It sounds like Germany may have a few more named crimes on the books, but we probably work out many of the nuances in sentencing for things less than murder. I also thing prosecutorial discretion comes in. An act may fit the definition of many crimes, but which one you are actually charged with might depend on the circumstances.
Canada’s incarceration rate is 114 which is quite a bit higher than Germany’s 78, so I assume we could learn something from German justice (unless we believe that English speakers are just criminal by nature, which, honestly, most English-speakers seem to). Anyway, we’re nowhere near the US’s 650+ incarceration rate, so these differences in classifying homicides aren’t a huge role-player in that difference. As you say, we’re we’re discussing moral shades here; there’s something very wrong going on in the US totally outside the scope of our discussion of criminal definitions.
I think it really depends how you interpret the action. Suppose we had this scenario (which I’m not saying is a good analogy for swatting): Someone puts one bullet in a six chamber revolver, spins the barrel, points it at someone and pulls the trigger. I’d say if the bullet chamber contains the bullet, they hit and kill the person, that’s murder, and I’d call it premeditated murder put it in with the worst kinds of murder.
So I think we have a wide range of possibilities in this case. It goes from the person who did the swatting really not understanding how dangerous what they were doing was to them gleefully wishing death on their target and watching the news hoping to see the carnage. In the latter case, I think an essentially maximum sentence is completely justified. I think I probably unjustifiably assumed the worst of this guy and assumed he was murderous, only talking about “ought to have known” for argument’s sake.
It’s certainly right to be suspicious of all US sentencing and plea bargains. Sentencing in the US runs from police being too quick to arrest, to prosecutors over-charging and bullying people into plea bargains, to judges over-sentencing, to law-makers over-legislating (and that’s ignoring the cases where people don’t live through their encounter with the cops).
