"I was so drunk I didn't know what I was doing." OK, says the jury:
A man who shot his drinking buddy to death was too drunk to mean it, a Lexington jury concluded. The attorney who swayed the jury, colorful Kentucky politican Gatewood Galbraith, spoke exclusively to WLKY.com after the verdict.
"I thought it was a fair verdict. It's certainly in accordance with the law, as the jury was instructed," Galbraith said. "There's no evidence that there was murder. There was all kinds of evidence that it was exactly what they found him guilty of: second-degree manslaughter. It was a tragedy. But it was dealt with, I thought, at the proper level. I thought the father of the deceased was a class act, a class gentleman.”
This opens up a whole new world of "it wasn't my fault" defenses. Whatever you do after drinking too much -- shoot your buddy, kill a pedestrian with your car, rape your neighbor's child -- just have a few more drinks before the cops show up. It was the alcohol, not you.
