Manslaughter and similar crimes such as vehicular homicide are hugely varied. They can be split into different groups with different considerations.

Negligence edit

This kind of crime is the one way a nice, law-abiding person can mess up badly enough to wind up going to prison for a long time. Obviously the negligence has to be bad because a court has decided it's bad enough to be a crime! But you have to take a step back and consider just how bad it was. Nobody convicted of manslaughter and similar crimes down this route set out to harm anybody on purpose.

Here's some things to think about:

  1. Was this longstanding negligence or brief?
  2. If it was a one-time thing was it prolonged?
  3. Was it done out of greed or selfishness?
  4. Did they take responsibility for their misdeeds?
  5. Have they got prior form for acting in this sort of way? For example, in a driving case have they been convicted of driving offences? In an industrial accident have they been fined or warned for workplace safety violations before?
  6. Was this simple carelessness or was it arrogance?
  7. Was one person or many put at risk?

Under those terms a caring doctor who messes up a surgery and accidentally kills a patient is unlikely to get listed here, but a street racer who runs a red light at 130mph and hits a pedestrian probably will.

Violence edit

Sometimes a person violently kills somebody without meaning to do them serious harm. This also has a huge variation. It can range from shoving somebody and them falling and hitting their head all the way to cases almost severe enough to be wicked murders. We have to step back and think about the assault itself, rather than the result. How nasty was the attack? Why did it happen?

See also: Specifications for Warranting a Page/Assault

Mental health edit

Some places offer manslaughter or a similar charge as a reduced crime where mental health played a role in a killing but where the killer is not completely insane. In other words the killer still has some responsibility.

This could be a case where the killer's responsibility is so small to be a technicality or so large to be truly evil. Think really carefully before adding those. Most of these aren't heinous enough because the illness is the main culprit, but some most certainly deserve listed. You have to go deep when researching these cases. Read many articles. Be cautious of quotes to the media. Examine what kind of sentence they got (mental hospital? free to go? or a long, long prison sentence?) and compare that to similar cases in the same location. Above all consider carefully and fairly how much was the illness and how much was the killer.

See also: Specifications for Warranting a Page/Mental health.