Indifference murder conviction not allowed to stand
The only murder trial to have taken place in three centuries on Shelter Island has been thrown out after the jury convicted the accused on the wrong charge.
A Suffolk County jury acquitted Kenneth Payne of intentional homicide in the 1998 shooting death of a friend and neighbour, whom he believed had threatened his daughter, convicting him instead of committing depraved indifference murder. But the New York State Court of Appeals, reports The New York Times, threw out that conviction, saying that someone who intends to kill a specific person cannot be convicted of depraved indifference murder. The decision is the third in little more than a year in which the high court has reversed a conviction involving depraved indifference, which is sometimes defined as a particularly grave sort of recklessness, such as firing a gun into a crowded room. Full report in the New York Times