The 1,200-mile assault
Rick has got a great one today about SWATting, where pranksters use cybertrickery to send out SWAT teams to scare the beejeezus out of unsuspecting homeowners. Here, I'll let him lead it off...
He told the 911 dispatcher he had killed someone in the house and more bloodshed would follow.
When SWAT units responded to the Southern California home from where the dispatcher thought the call originated, they confronted a man with a weapon and readied their assault rifles.
But unlike this month's Winnetka SWAT standoff - in which Edwin Rivera killed his father, two brothers and LAPD Officer Randal Simmons - this man was innocent, and no tragedy had occurred.
It was all a joke.
Randal Ellis, 19, who lived 1,200 miles away in Washington state, used a computer to trick the 911 dispatcher into believing the "emergency" was inside a home in Orange County, prosecutors allege.
It's all fun and games until someone gets blown away by an AR-15, right? And I don't suppose it's real cheap to wake up the D-team and send them charging across town in hot pursuit of your dumb joke, either.
Further down, I noticed an interesting legal argument... .
In the Orange County case, Ellis is facing five felony counts and one misdemeanor for the March incident, including computer fraud, assault with a machine gun and false imprisonment by violence, Emami said.
The last two charges offer a novel prosecution strategy for a crime that doesn't have much precedence. Prosecutors will argue Ellis is guilty of both crimes "by proxy," meaning that because of his actions, the responding officers acted, in effect, as an agent for him.
"Even though the defendant wasn't actually there in Lake Forest pointing weapons at them, he was directly responsible for what happened to these victims," Emami said.
Ellis has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his attorney, Ron Brower, said he disagrees with the D.A.'s "proxy" argument and will ask that those charges be dropped.
"It's our legal opinion that the law does not support that kind of assault by proxy or that vicarious liability," Brower said.
Now the proxy angle's pretty interesting. It's like the prosecutors are saying Ellis is the puppetmaster here, directing the cops to show up with their rifles against their will. And that makes sense on one hand, but how far does this hold up?
This ended safely enough, with no one getting hurt. But suppose this was a different homeowner, freaked out that there's all these guys running around in black jumpsuits with rifles in his front yard, grabs a gun. Maybe he's a gun enthusiast and he thinks this is Ruby Ridge all over again. The cops, who've been warned that there's a crazy man inside, see someone running around with a strap. One side sees the other, someone gets antsy, a trigger gets pulled and pretty soon, someone's fun little prank turns into an epic gun battle. Cops die, the homeowner gets shot up, the neighbors' houses catch on fire-- it's not that hard to imagine.
So when it's all sorted out, how far can they extend this proxy charge? Is the caller then guilty of murder, by causing the cops to show up, instilling legitimate fear in the homeowner and setting off a blow-up that didn't have to happen? I guess that would be up to a jury, but could they even be charged with it? It looks like they could. I wonder if this works for lo-tech means, as well. If you trick someone into committing a crime for what they thought were legitimate reasons (self-defense, for example), can they avoid the charges and you end up the defendant. It seems you would _ and should.
This is weird stuff, friends, very weird, something you'd expect in a Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd thriller, rather than here in the Daily News. Nice work, Rick, glad you brought it to light.
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