 Hi, I'm David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor and today I'm going to talk about the crime of second degree murder now In Arizona the definition is did somebody cause a death intentionally? Knowingly that means they knew their conduct will cause serious physical injury or death or with extreme indifference to human life and they recklessly engaged in the conduct which created a Grave risk of injury or death that means you're just shooting a gun in the air and Or drive by we're just firing at a building and of course the bullet could go through and hit somebody inside Now this is overcharged a lot a lot of times You'll see them the prosecutor charged second-degree murder when really it's a manslaughter a negligent homicide for example a DUI death It really should be a manslaughter charged to start out with not a secondary murder or if somebody shooting a gun in there with their friends and Somehow one ricochets and hit somebody else It really shouldn't be second-degree. That's more of a purely a reckless standard of care instead of reckless standard of conduct Now punishment if a person has no prior convictions. They're looking at ten years minimum 16 is the presumptive 22 is the max and that's a day-for-day prison time the policy offer at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office or most of the County Attorney's offices a 10 to 16 year offer many times We get them to drop it to manslaughter and give the minimum of seven years Which is really about five and a half years of actual time. So it does matter if you're charged with Second-degree or manslaughter now the defenses. There's always self-defense. Were you defending yourself others? Were you inside your house the castle doctrine protecting property? We look into all of that. There's super beating cause Yes, there may have been a fight and somebody was sent to the hospital But did they die because of negligence of the hospital staff? Did the ambulance get hit on the way to the hospital? Was there something else that caused a death or were there two bullet wounds from two different bullets that often can be a debate of super beating cause We have very good experts. We have tool mark experts that judge the spiral on a bullet from the inside of the barrel They call it rifling or tool mark. We have ballistics experts DNA experts both mitochondrial and trace DNA gunshot residue Blood spatter, crime steam reconstruction, human factors experts We also attack with Miranda rights violations, right to counsel violations All sorts of different attacks on second-degree murder cases. If you go to our victory section You'll see we have numerous cases where we either had it dismissed outright One at a trial knocked it down to something other than second-degree maybe to Manslaughter or all the way down to negligent homicide. In fact, we had one case Where a gentleman was Going to be indicted for second-degree. We attacked it a grand jury got it down to negligent homicide Ultimately he ended up doing 17 months in custody That's a lot better than 10 to 22 years. So go to our site www.dmcantor.com or just dmcantor.com or give us a call at 602 307 0808 set a free initial consultation. It'll take about an hour on these types of cases We do it for free. We'll look into every fact involving the case And we will see if we can get you or a loved one out of this either factually or technically So I look forward to hearing from you soon. Take care