Killer gets 180-day sentence for YouTube stunt gone wrong
Lifehack: Killing someone in cold blood, passion or even accidentally can land a person in jail for years, if not decades. But, if you film it, you could get off with a significantly less stringent sentence.
If you're big into Darwinism, you might remember Monalisa Perez. Last year, she and her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz III, parted ways, permanently, after a YouTube video they were filming went horribly, predictably wrong. This wasn't the pair's first doing-dumb-things-on-camera rodeo. They'd posted questionable stunts to YouTube before. This time around, they planned on taking the Internet by storm with footage of Perez firing a gun at Ruiz, who believed that he could stop a bullet with nothing more than a hardcover book. There were a couple of issues with this plan. First, trusting a book to protect you from death, unless you're boning up on how to make an anti-venom, is insane. Second, the pistol that Perez fired at her beau was a .50 caliber Desert Eagle. For the uninitiated, this is an insanely powerful handgun. With the right load, a round fired from it can bop through a bulletproof vest or pierce light ceramic or steel armor. In short, there was a very high probability that a book wasn't going to cut it.
Despite this, Perez stood a foot away from her man and fired a single round. It went through the book! It went into him! He was killed! She got it all on tape, with not one, but two cameras. When Ruiz went down, she called 911 and told the operator what had happened. In December, Perez plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. According to The Star Tribune, this past week, as the result of a plea bargain, she was sentenced to 180-days in jail for the crime:
Monalisa Perez's punishment, as outlined in an agreement to plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter, is a 180-day jail term, and lifetime bans on possessing a firearm or receiving payment for telling the story of the June shooting of 22-year-old Pedro Ruiz III outside their home in the northwestern Minnesota town of Halstad.
The sentence falls below state sentencing guidelines that would have sent her to prison. Norman County Attorney James Brue said that was proper under the circumstances for the 20-year-old mother of two.
What do you folks think? Is the sentence too lenient, given the circumstances? Or, taking her intentions into account, does it seem fair?
Image via Wikipedia Commons
