Depraved-Heart Murder

Depraved-heart murder is a category of homicide, chiefly in United States law, in which a person causes death through conduct so recklessly indifferent to human life that the law treats it as murder even though the person never explicitly intended to kill. Courts describe the standard as the willful commission of a dangerous act with wanton disregard for whether it kills, judged just as culpable as a purposeful killing and therefore charged as murder rather than manslaughter. Jurisdictions vary in how they label it, prosecuting it as second-degree murder, wanton murder or third-degree murder depending on the state, and it has been applied in cases such as Commonwealth v. Malone in 1946, a fatal game of Russian roulette, and more recently in the prosecutions arising from the deaths of Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2021. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/