msmith wrote:
alphytha wrote:
To be fair to China, this sort of thing happens in other countries too. Last year a homeless man in New York defended a woman from an attacker, and ended up getting stabbed in the process. He lay on the footpath dying for over an hour while over twenty people walked past, some stopping to take cellphone pictures.

Yeah, and it's not even a new phenomenon. Every law school in the country teaches the Kitty Genovese case to illustrate the proposition that failing to report a crime is not usually a crime itself. Something like 38 people watched Kitty Genovese get raped and murdered on a street in New York in the 1960s, and not only did no one try to help her, no one even bothered to call the police.

I'm currently in law school and as an aside in Torts our professor had us discuss the Sherrice Iverson case (which I had never heard of prior to this class) someone brought up the Kitty Genovese thing. I had always assumed someone had a legal duty to report heinous crimes like this. Here's a 60 minutes interview with Cash if anyone's interested. I think part of the problem is that Cash is such a disgusting, unsympathetic human being in the first place, it's difficult to even hear out his "argument": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqTdXOQmXrc

(disclaimer: I do understand the difficulties with instituting "good samaritan" type laws)

Last Edited By: cc07d Oct 19 11 3:01 PM. Edited 1 times.