Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 August 6

= August 6 =

alleged shooter
I see stuff in the news about the alleged shooters in the recent El Paso and Dayton shootings. The El Paso suspect was arrested and pending outcome of a criminal trial, he's presumably (cough) innocent, so I understand why the newspapers have to refer to him as "alleged". If and when he is convicted, they get to call him a shooter instead of an alleged shooter. The Dayton suspect, on the other hand, is dead, though perhaps still pursuing an acting career doing Stanislavskian impressions of Swiss cheese. Barring a cadaver synod he is unlikely to be put on trial. So will he always only be an alleged shooter, or is there a grace period (30 days?) after which he becomes a shooter, or what? Not seeking legal advice yada yada. Just wondering. Thanks. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 03:49, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Well, you're looking at it from the libel perspective from the suspect, but in reality in most situations it's entirely possible that the police are wrong about the suspect, or that there are additional perpetrators. In short, my understanding is that this soon after a crime there is still going to be an investigation by police even though the prime suspect is dead. When that investigation concludes, there may be a formal release or disclosure of what happened. I have no idea what standards the media use, but that's my take on what the law and order side of it is—even when the case seems obvious to us, the police still have things they have to do to ensure that obvious result is in fact correct. —/M endaliv /2¢/Δ's/ 04:31, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Obviously conviction requires a trial, and a trial of a dead person is a posthumous trial. Although these have been done occasionally, they are extremely rare and usually for show. It's actually very hard to find anyone actually talking about whether these can happen outside of Russia, but the Warren Report does explicitly state that "under our system there is no provision for a posthumous trial." The eponymous Earl Warren helped write that, and I think it's safe to assume he knew what he was talking about. Okay, so criminally, the accused is never convicted. In some contexts it is possible for a deceased individual to be found responsible for something at civil trial (this is handled by probate law), but not quite the same thing. As for how the media handles this, that's really just up to them. You cannot libel the dead, but by personal observation I feel that media tends to wait until there has been some kind of official investigative conclusion before declaring that the deceased accused was responsible. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:59, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Mendaliv and Someguy1221, thanks for the answers, which were clarifying and helpful. It makes sense that there will still be an LE investigation that will eventually close with a finding.  Someguy1221, I remember Ken Lay was tried and convicted for his part in the Enron scam, then died of a heart attack while an appeal was pending, so his conviction was vacated (per his biography) by abatement ab initio which meant that the government/Lay's creditors/whoever were not able to collect the financial restitution that Lay was supposed to pay.  Lay's estate got to keep some tens of millions because of that iirc.  A posthumous appelate proceeding could have helped I guess.  173.228.123.207 (talk) 05:07, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * The government et al. were unable to to collect restitution via criminal penalty. This does not prevent recovery via civil lawsuit, whether by the government or an individual. However, it's a lot harder. See, in the event of a criminal conviction, not only can restitution be part of the penalty, the conviction turns the guilt of the accused into a matter of fact that may be introduced in a civil lawsuit. That is, if you hit someone with a car, and you are convicted in court of hitting that person with your car, your victim doesn't have to prove that you hit him with your car when he sues you. Since Lay's criminal case got tossed, that means whoever does the civil suit has to prove it all over again. And by god did they try. The main lawsuit against the Lay estate lasted until 2011, five years after his death. Specifically it ended in a settlement, but damn if I can't find any details about how much money was actually left by then. Someguy1221 (talk) 06:50, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Could the Lay litigants re-use the evidence from Lay's criminal trial? Probably. I don't know about the practical issues of getting possession of the evidence, but as long as it was available and in the public record they could probably use it. One of the problems though, in white collar financial cases like that, there's a lot that hinges on expert analysis of financial records, and so in order to use that analysis, you'd need to have the expert available to testify. Now, that's not too hard to do in theory; you can just subpoena the guy if he doesn't want to testify, but you really don't want to do that if you can help it since it's a great way to piss off an expert witness. The other problem is that you can't just skip the discovery parts of it. So this guy is gonna have to be available for depositions. Oh, and of course, you're going to be paying through the nose for all this service he's providing. It's entirely possible the plaintiffs' attorneys would prefer to use their own experts. The tl;dr of it, I'd say, is that while you could probably import a lot of the evidence, you wouldn't be able to skip discovery, so the time and cost savings would probably not be all that great. —/M endaliv /2¢/Δ's/ 08:21, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that. Lay's biography really should be updated with it.  If you want to do it that would be great.  Otherwise I'll toss it on my todo list but I'm not editing much these days so it's likely to sit there for a while.  I guess Lay isn't going anywhere though.  And hmm, it occurs to me that the government is trying to collect something like $12 billion from El Chapo, who also has appeals pending, so I hope they are keeping him well protected.  With Jeffrey Epstein it is probably more complicated. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 07:57, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Btw, did the side doing the civil lawsuit against the Lay estate only have to meet a civil instead of criminal standard of evidence, like in the wrongful death suit against OJ Simpson after Simpson's criminal acquittal? Was that easier?  Could the Lay litigants re-use the evidence from Lay's criminal trial?  Just wondering. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 08:00, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Absolutely, it would've been a civil suit and therefore subject to civil burdens of proof. Just bear in mind though that it's not a civil suit to establish the criminal charges. Like in the Simpson case, the criminal charge was murder, but the civil suit was for wrongful death. I'm not sure how the Lay cases were structured, but something similar would've been the case. As to whether it's easier, I'd say probably. The standard of proof would definitely be lower, but in criminal prosecutions in practice there's a huge advantage to being the prosecution (which is why the standard of proof is so high).

England name
Hi, why did England eventually end up being named after the Angles, rather than say the Saxons, Picts, Celts, Jutes, etc. The Angles only seem to have settled in Anglia, and seemed to have arrived around the same time, or after, as the other tribes. We refer to pre-conquest England as Anglo-Saxon, so how did England instead of Saxonland, for instance, come to dominate? Was the naming of the country/kingdom controversial at the time as the majority of the population were not Angles? —Andrew 08:45, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * History of Anglo-Saxon England and England will be of help. Naming have some logic, but not so much as it the result can be predicted or explained afterward. Gem fr (talk) 09:10, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Because then we'd live in Sexland and speak Sexish. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:11, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I’d be cool with that - we’d be even more liberal than the Nordic countries - in one respect, at least —Andrew 13:30, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * It appears they were using "Angle" first. Maybe just because A comes before S? And another oddity: How did the A's of Anglo-Saxon turn into E's? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:56, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * According to article Angles, it's due to "i-mutation" (a.k.a. umlaut). AnonMoos (talk) 14:49, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * According to traditional lore, the Jutes settled in a rather small area around Kent, so they weren't really in the running (while the Picts weren't in England at all). There is a Celtic name for England -- Logres -- but that would have been an exonym for speakers of the Anglo-Saxon or Old English language.  Not sure why Angles were given the preference to Saxons onomastically, except maybe that people called Saxons were very prominent on the European mainland after the Germanic settlement of England, while Angles weren't... AnonMoos (talk) 14:47, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Alfred the Great promoted the use of the name "Anglecynn" to unify his people. See Sarah Foot "The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest" in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vol. 6 (1996), pp. 25-49. DuncanHill (talk) 15:01, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * While it may be somewhat ironic that a king of Wessex (thus of a Saxon kingdom specifically) would name his land after the Angles (whose lands were East Anglia/Mercia/Northumberland) it is important to note that the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain happened some four centuries before Alfred the Great. There's a lot of time for names to change and vary and for language to drift.  -- Jayron 32 16:15, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * I’d have thought given they settled around London, which I assume was as politically important then as it’s always been, that might have given the Jutes a bit more influence? —Andrew 16:06, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * To judge from conventional maps (File:Anglo_saxon_jute_575ad.jpg etc.), they settled to one side of London, on the south bank. Anyway, London was kind of at a low point during that period -- not really any kind of capital of any large or important realm until the 10th century... AnonMoos (talk) 19:21, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Alfred, and many other kings of Wessex and later kings of England, tended to base their courts at Winchester, which would have been the seat of political power.  Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned there (and usually based their courts there) all the way through the Norman Conquest.  -- Jayron 32 12:38, 7 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Pope Gregory I's famous quip: Non Angli, sed angeli ("Not Angels Angles but angels") is the generally quoted reason why the Saxons preferred to be called English. The anecdote comes to us from the Venerable Bede, whose epic history completed in 731 was called Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History of the English People") including Angles Jutes and Saxons. Alansplodge (talk) 19:30, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
 * By the way, Celtic speakers still refer to us as Saxons: Welsh say Sais for a person and Saison for the language, and we all know about Sassenach in Scotland. In 1602, Richard Carew found that asking a local any question in Cornwall would elicit the reply: Meea navidna caw zasawzneck ("I speak no Saxonage"), even though it was obvious that they knew exactly what was being said. Alansplodge (talk) 19:40, 7 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Alan, I think you mean "not Angles, but angels" in your translation... or, as 1066 and All That has it, 'not angels, but Anglicans' AndrewWTaylor (talk) 21:38, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, now corrected. Alansplodge (talk) 19:13, 8 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Anyway, better to be named after the Angles than after the Circles, Lines, Points, Squares or Miscellaneous Geometric Concepts. :)  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:15, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
 * It's not uncommon to find obtuse Angles. Alansplodge (talk) 19:13, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * The famous Page 3 babes are a-cute Angles. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:39, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * You squared a fair point, no way we can circle the wagon against that punch line. Gem fr (talk) 22:22, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Don't forget their famous queen, Polly Hedron. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:55, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * ... (Not to be confused with Kings of the Angles -- which is not to be confused with Los Angles: a terrible place to drive —too many sharp corners.) 107.15.157.44 (talk) 03:04, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Preferring Angles to Circles in rebellion against the traditions of Flatland? —Tamfang (talk) 17:48, 10 August 2019 (UTC)