Man murders wife for life insurance; gets 4.5 years

[Darth Wong]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/05/aus ... index.html

Alabama man jailed in scuba honeymoon death

(CNN) -- An Alabama man was sentenced to 4½ years in prison Friday for his wife's death during their honeymoon in Australia nearly six years ago.

David Gabriel Watson pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the October 2003 death of Tina Watson, an Australian court spokesman said.

Watson was 26 when she drowned while diving around the "Yongala" shipwreck, about 42 miles off the coast of Townsville.

Watson had told police that his wife appeared to panic 45 feet underwater and drowned accidentally. However, authorities found inconsistencies in his account.

As evidence of a motive, investigators cited her father's statement that Watson had asked her to maximize her life insurance and make him the beneficiary shortly before their wedding.

The insurance company confirmed that Watson asked about her policy after her death, investigators said.

Townsville Coroner David Glasgow noted in his inquest findings that David was an experienced diver while his wife was a novice.

The couple married in Birmingham, Alabama, and left for Australia two days later.

How the hell is 4½ years remotely proportional here? This is obviously first degree murder: the guy even asked her to max out her life insurance just before their honeymoon. Is this kind of sentencing normal in Australia?

[Kanastrous]

He'll only serve one year.

[Surlethe]

Should someone who murders a wife or family member, or child, be given a commensurately higher sentence than someone who kills a stranger? A person has much greater responsibility for the health, happiness, and well-being of, say, a spouse than for that of a stranger, so if someone kills his spouse (for money, no less) he's committed a much more grievous breach of responsibility than if he kills a stranger.

[tim31]

Is this kind of sentencing normal in Australia?

He pleaded guilty to manslaughter; five years is(from memory) about par. Sounds like some pretty good lawyering to actually get manslaughter and not murder, and I'll point out that this all happened in Queensland. Down here the courts tend to make murder stick and put them away for a long time. People only get manslaughter down here if they kill someone while driving drunk, and even then there's usually a public outrage that they 'got off too easy' with a 5-10 year sentence.

[weemadando]

It's manslaughter - not murder that he copped to, hence the sentence.

*edit* aaaaand thank you Tim.

[tim31]

Any time. I've just looked into Tasmanian versus Queensland law and the systems are the same; all serious criminal offenses fall under a single piece of legislation. In both states, Section 13 of the code covers the mens rea, which is obviously where this guy got off so lightly.

[FSTargetDrone]

So the prosecution felt they couldn't bring murder charges against him and settled for manslaughter?

[Darth Wong]

How the fuck does he get off with manslaughter? This looks to be about as premeditated as it gets.

[DaveJB]

Lack of any truly decisive evidence for murder I would imagine. The whole picture seems to point to murder, but whether there was enough evidence to make that stick is another matter.

From what I gather, Australia's implementation of the "Double Jeopardy" principle means that if any evidence did come up, they'd be able to re-try him for murder anyway, so they may well have thought it was best to get him behind bars while they could and hope something comes up in the interim.

[Havok]

Is there any other information on the case? It sounds shady as hell to me, but Jenn and I talked about the whole life insurance thing before we got married as well, along with making each other the sole beneficiaries. (We haven't done it yet.)

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yeah, let's not forget that this happened six years ago and there appears to have been absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever that he actually committed the crime. Of course considering what they did to Chris with even less evidence that should get him first-degree premeditated in Australia, so...

[Psychic_Sandwich]

How the fuck does he get off with manslaughter? This looks to be about as premeditated as it gets.

Probably because they can't actually prove that he deliberately turned off her air or something. He was probably the only witness to what happened, after all; it's difficult to see things clearly at 20 meters down if there's even a little bit of silt in the water, let alone at 45 meters.

That last bit, however, is probably a pretty good case for negligence at least. The article said he was experienced and she was a novice. It doesn't say what level of qualification they had, but (assuming they're PADI, since they're American) if they're going to 45 meters, they should have been Advanced Open Water Divers or Adventure Divers who had done the Deep Diving course. Given what the article states, it looks like he had those qualifications and she didn't.

That makes a pretty good case for negligence or something similar at the very least, I suppose, but it also makes murder very hard to prove; somebody who's not been down that deep could very easily panic and drown, especially if the visability wasn't very good. It's really easy to panic at a depth as low as six meters if the vis is poor. Moreover, at that depth, you get things like nitrogen narcosis, that make things like throwing away your regs seem like a good idea. The chairman of my club was nearly killed doing that when he was narked, for example.

Basically, diving to that depth is dangerous enough even with training and experiance that without witnesses, it would be impossible to prove murder, but you can, at the very least, make a pretty watertight argument that he got her killed simply by taking her too deep.

[JointStrikeFighter]

He did voluntarily return to Australia to face charges.

[Bounty]

I'm not seeing the clear murder charge here.

From the article there's a boatload of circumstantial evidence but is there anything that can't be explained as being coincidental? Yes, he upped the insurance - but they were going on what is at the end of the day a dangerous activity. Yes, he inquired about the insurance payout - who wouldn't? Yes, he is the only witness to her death - but doesn't seem unusual when you're diving.

The case reeks to high heaven, granted, but it takes more than that to convict someone of murder and put them away for most of their life. In this case I think it was a good decision to err on the side of caution and only convict him on a charge that was clear beyond reasonable doubt.

[Serafina]

Much as i hate it, i have to agree with Bounty - not because i do not like Bounty, but because i hate to agree to something like that, emotionally i want to see this guy in jail for a long time.

But then again:
There are two possibilities:
-His wife died due to an accident. The upped life-insurance is only reasonable when you want to go on an dangerous activity. So, he is innocent - he may not have been able to help her, made a couple of errors or similar things - but thats not manslaughter, thats part of an accident.
-He deliberatly killed his wife. Tge upped life-insurance suggests that he did so out of greed - which IS murder.

I do not really see a middle ground - either you believe that it was an accident, in which case he is not guilty of any crime, or you belive he killed her, in which case it WAS murder, not manslaughter.
Just saying "we do not know for sure, lets give him a lower sentence" is not justice - either he deserves nothing or more than that. Either you are sending an innocent man to jail, or you let a murder walk after 4 years.

[Archaic`]

The fact that he voluntarily returned to Australia and entered a guilty plea to the Manslaughter charge certainly acted in his favor. Would he even have been extradited by US authorities if the Australian police had pursued him more strongly, given the weakness of the Murder case against him?

[Psychic_Sandwich]

But then again:
There are two possibilities:
-His wife died due to an accident. The upped life-insurance is only reasonable when you want to go on an dangerous activity. So, he is innocent - he may not have been able to help her, made a couple of errors or similar things - but thats not manslaughter, thats part of an accident.
-He deliberatly killed his wife. Tge upped life-insurance suggests that he did so out of greed - which IS murder.

He was apparently an experienced diver. Probably PADI, considering his country of origin, but that's pretty irrelevant. No diving organisation, be they PADI, BSAC, SSI or anybody else, would let a novice diver go below about 20 meters. If he was an experianced diver, he would know that, and know the reasons behind it. Even if he didn't murder her, he did kill her by taking her too deep when he should have known better. That doesn't necessarily mean murder, though.

[Admiral Drason]

How the fuck does he get off with manslaughter? This looks to be about as premeditated as it gets.

Probably because they can't actually prove that he deliberately turned off her air or something. He was probably the only witness to what happened, after all; it's difficult to see things clearly at 20 meters down if there's even a little bit of silt in the water, let alone at 45 meters.

That last bit, however, is probably a pretty good case for negligence at least. The article said he was experienced and she was a novice. It doesn't say what level of qualification they had, but (assuming they're PADI, since they're American) if they're going to 45 meters, they should have been Advanced Open Water Divers or Adventure Divers who had done the Deep Diving course. Given what the article states, it looks like he had those qualifications and she didn't.

The article actually says that they were only down 45 feet not 45 meters. The charter dive boat, that took them out would have been responsible for negeligence if they let an underqualified diver in the water not the divers partner. At least thats how it went when I used to help my dad Dive Master over the summers. (I'm a certified Rescue Diver under PADI)

[Serafina]

I have to admit, i misinterpretaded the term "manslaughter".
I read is as the german charge "Totschlag", which basically means that you kill someone, but do not have so-called "lesser motives, which are required for murder (i.e. greed, hate-crimes).
However, it seems to be more similar to the german charge "fahrlässige Tötung" (i think it translates with Criminally negligent manslaughter), which means that your actions result in the death of another person, but the action itself was neither violent nor malintended (typically, they result out of stupidity or being overly careless) - which may have happened in this case.

If my interpretation is correct, there are three possibilities:
-He murdered her for the money ->murder
-Her death was a result of diving too deep, and he should have know better -> Criminally negligent manslaughter
-Her death was a result of diving too deep, but he had no better knowledge -> he's not guilty of any crime

Of course, its easy to determine if he had better knowledge than his wife and knew about the dangers - if he was an experiened diver and he was not, thats the case, and he is at least guilty of criminally negligent manslaughter.

Edit: Of course, thats only true if they dived into an unreasonably dangerous depth.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

I have to admit, i misinterpretaded the term "manslaughter".
I read is as the german charge "Totschlag", which basically means that you kill someone, but do not have so-called "lesser motives, which are required for murder (i.e. greed, hate-crimes).
However, it seems to be more similar to the german charge "fahrlässige Tötung" (i think it translates with Criminally negligent manslaughter), which means that your actions result in the death of another person, but the action itself was neither violent nor malintended (typically, they result out of stupidity or being overly careless) - which may have happened in this case.

If my interpretation is correct, there are three possibilities:
-He murdered her for the money ->murder
-Her death was a result of diving too deep, and he should have know better -> Criminally negligent manslaughter
-Her death was a result of diving too deep, but he had no better knowledge -> he's not guilty of any crime

Of course, its easy to determine if he had better knowledge than his wife and knew about the dangers - if he was an experiened diver and he was not, thats the case, and he is at least guilty of criminally negligent manslaughter.

Edit: Of course, thats only true if they dived into an unreasonably dangerous depth.

I'll put it this way; if she really was a novice diver, or even an Open Water Diver, say, what this was was the equivalent of a guy who's been rock climbing for twenty years inviting a bloke who's had a couple of months practice at the local climbing wall to scale Mount Everest with him.

45 meters is deep. The BSAC limit for diving on air is 50m, and beyond that you need to use trimix and a rebreather. I don't know what the PADI limit is, since I'm a BSAC diver, but it's going to be about the same for reasons of biology. 30 meters is dangerous for a novice diver, since that's the depth you need to start worrying about nitrogen narcosis, which is rather like being drunk, except without the need for alcohol. It's perfectly possible, therefore, to be narked and not realise it. That's a problem for all divers, but more experianced divers are more likely to a) do things right anyway, and b) notice that their judgement is impaired. A novice, on the other hand, will be more likely to fuck up, and less likely to notice they're narked in the first place.

Beyond that, 45 meters is past the point where you have to worry about oxygen toxicity, which is the entire reason it's the sort of depth where you start using trimix and rebreathers rather than regular air; a rebreather keeps your ppO2 at a non-lethal level. Stress and the like increase the chances of suffering from oxygen toxicity, and a novice diving to 45 meters is going to be stressed. I haven't dived the Yongala myself, but I know people who have, and the visibility can apparently be appalling sometimes, which isn't going to help.

So, yes, insanely dangerous. I wouldn't buy any argument that he didn't know that, either; BSAC hammers it into your head that people who haven't done the necessary training don't go below certain depths, and PADI isn't all that different according to people who've done crossover courses.

EDIT: That's not even going into stuff like decompression stops, which a novice is unlikely to have the buoyancy control to do properly, and thus runs an increased risk of DCI.

[White Haven]

FEET, people, not meters, FEET. 45 feet is a little less than 14 meters.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

Ah, in that case it's a lot less stupid, and thus a lot more suspicious. It's still easily possible for it to be exactly what he claimed, though.

[The Spartan]

45 meters is deep. The BSAC limit for diving on air is 50m, and beyond that you need to use trimix and a rebreather. I don't know what the PADI limit is, since I'm a BSAC diver, but it's going to be about the same for reasons of biology.

PADI Basic Open Water limit is 60 ft; about 18 meters. Advanced Open Water is 100 ft; about 30 meters.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

I was after the MOD PADI sets for air, rather than the depths you're supposed to go, but I didn't know Advanced Open Water Diver was only 30 meters. Learn something new every day.

[weemadando]

It's a fairly bullshit situation. I have an Advanced Cert through NASDS and though I haven't logged a dive in a few years I can certainly tell you that it's fucking hard to turn off someone's air. And it certainly won't happen accidentally. I've seen people fucking FREAK OUT on a dive most notably during a wreck dive in New Caledonia, a Japanese tourist panicked inflated their BC and just fucking ROCKETED to the surface - one of the supervisors went up, dragged her back down to depth and kept her there to get her through decompression properly - but if there's proper supervision or training a panicking diver shouldn't be an issue for anyone. And given that this isn't the first case of someone dying or getting fucked over during a dive charter in QLD (leaving 2 people behind to drown anyone?) I'd have to say that the healthy doses of negligence that have existed there prior just serve to make it harder to convince a jury that this WAS the husband beyond any reasonable doubt.