say this overcharged. overcharged, thank you. but i guess the question is, if she hasn t gone for first-degree, would we be saying she didn t shoot high enough? given that we re talking about murder. no, i don t think so. here s why. first of all, there s a great strategic advantage if she just charged him with second-degree murder. she would have had a jury of six in florida, not 12-of course, it s much easier to get consensus from six people than it is among 12 people. that would have been an advantage. and the burden of proof is lower. look, the burden of proof is always on the state in every case. they have to prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt. first-degree murder requires proof of premeditation. there was a lot of talk in this trial about whether there was premeditation or not. they got hung up on that. take that out of the equation. just charge him with second-degree murder with the lesser included offense of manslaughter, and the prosecutors would have a much
right, in which the balancing test. the balancing interest is can you capture them and is there going to be undue harm? will it be too hard? you can malk a scenario in which the test that is laid out in the white paper leads do you the conclusion that under that balancing test you strike it. i think you want to attack the test. but before you start to say that these things are likely to happen, if you had a pramg like this going on i didn t say exactly. even impropable. the key thing to do is not worry about imagining but worry about demonstrated illustrations of abuse and there have been some and then the question you ask is whether or not they ve tried to take something. to quote john brennan i m not a lawyer. i am. but brennan said i m not a lawyer and then said everything we re doing is perfectly legal except when asked about torture. then he said i m not lawyer. i want any lawyer at the table here and there are a few of them, tell me that signature strikes are
al qaeda and those are hotly contested issues. we re saying and we ve said against the government that at the time that an kwar al awlaki and the others were killed there was no around conflict in yemen and the government instead of saying here are all the reasons why they re saying we don t think the court should look at it just to be clear, the government s law is to secure state s secrets. saying they have no role in assuming it s an armed conflict. i don t think you could possibly make the claim that there isn t an armed conflict going on given the kinds of threats that are involved. i mean it seems to me that the remarks you made at the outsit follows. nothing like that is going to happen. i mean or that we take diligent work yochl view to be extremely proactive. i do think that this is not a judicial question whether it is an armed conflict. there s a political question there. thing on that one, hina s wrong.
wise or moral, what s the option? i think the second prong is important. there needs to be a serious inquiry and feasiblelet of capture. again, i go back to the question if it s a armed conflict. i don t think there s if there s evidence that he s engaged in ongoing attacks and capture is not feasible, i don t think it s as hard of a question. if that information is not accurate and we re talking about operating in a self-defense rubric, i think that there needs to be extremely high demanding standards for determining that there is an imminent threat. well, part of the problem is that all of those standards are going to be internal to the executive. that is pa rt of the problem and what we re assuming is partly what s contested. look.
a challenge for me and my successor for some time to come. there s a remoteness to it to make it telling too somehow think it can without any mess on our hand solve the veking problems. that gets to the question what s the bar for actually doing this stuff. i want to talk about that and the concept of imminence and how important that is and then whether we are at a perpetual war. what does that mean for the way we operate, as citizens, as a nation right after we take this break. one? think again. introducing olay professional even skin tone. developed by experts in skin genomics to target 5 major causes of uneven skin tone and help restore even color. olay professional even skin tone.