New York stabbing bystanders show the law's moral limits

Morris was eventually taken to a hospital but died from his wounds. Eighteen-year-old Tyler Flach pleaded not guilty Thursday to second-degree murder charges in Morris' death.

The tragedy puts an eerie modern twist on the "bystander effect," a phenomenon introduced by psychologists after the infamous 1964 Kew Gardens, New York, murder of Kitty Genovese, in which it was initially reported, erroneously, that as many as 38 people witnessed the stabbing, but did nothing (the number turned out to be a gross exaggeration).

Social psychology aside, the law has long grappled with the idea of placing affirmative duties on bystanders in such situations. The imperfect consensus has been that many states, including New York, have enacted "Good Samaritan Laws" to encourage bystanders to provide life-saving assistance in times of emergency by shielding from criminal or civil liability those who call law enforcement or who try to give lifesaving help. However, the law typically does not place an affirmative duty on bystanders to help in such situations.

Morris' killing and the way in which the law inevitably will not be able to account for the circumstances surrounding it is understandably frustrating. Law can never fully address the moral failings of humanity, which is why there need to be so many more societal interventions in conjunction with the legal system to address this kind of behavior.

The episode also highlights the uneasy role that our culture's obsession with social media plays in the criminal justice system today. Calling it a "senseless act of violence," Phyllis Harrington, superintendent of Oceanside High School where Morris was a senior, seemed to miss the mark, under the grim circumstances, in her YouTube address, encouraging students and parents to use "restraint and judgment" on social media, and not to use it to "engage in spreading rumors."

To many, her monologue will no doubt ring hollow, in light of the fact that at least some of Morris' peers recorded his suffering and did absolutely nothing to help him. Sadly, the phenomenon is not new. Live-streaming acts of crime has baffled law enforcement in recent years, and the practice is on the rise. In a particularly harrowing incident, in 2016, an 18-year-old was accused of live streaming her 17-year-old friend's rape on Periscope. In that case, the 18-year-old was charged with many of the same crimes as the perpetrator himself, including rape and sexual battery.

But in situations like the Long Island killing with its dozens of onlookers -- some recording it -- prosecutors will likely face the difficult task of where to draw the line between passive onlooker and active participant. In some cases, any encouragement of the crime is enough to trigger accomplice liability, which dictates that the charged accomplice will receive the same punishment as the actual perpetrator of the crime (as was the case in the teen who live-streamed her friend's rape).

Police and prosecutors will no doubt conduct a rigorous fact-specific inquiry with respect to each individual involved in this incident when assessing their potential liability, and it remains unclear what specific statutory violations (if any) may be charged against individuals not directly involved in the violence. Prosecutors likely won't make the case to charge any of the onlookers with accomplice liability if they can't show that the onlooker acted with an intent to assist the crime -- a result that will leave many feeling queasy.

We cannot rely on the law to fix the underlying moral problem here. We need direct intervention, particularly when it comes to our youth, to address these issues head on; we need more than a YouTube video urging "restraint." Unfortunately, there may well be many more crimes heartlessly documented like Khaseen Morris' killing before we figure out a solution.

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