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I'm writing a story loosely based on real events from my life and I'm running out of time. There's A LOT riding on how good this story ends up being and I want to make it realistic, so please help me.
Let's say that someone, we'll call him Jim, shot his 28 year old granddaughter, we'll Amy, in the chest not too long ago. His lawyer's trying to blame the incident on his possible Alzheimer's and a certain medication he was on, but the court's not going for it. Amy was staying the night at Jim's house to take care of him while he was sick and he went into her room that night and shot her three times while she slept. She survived, but one bullet went through the artery that feeds blood into her heart and put a hole in it.
She had surgery to repair it, but the hospital
f---ed up and did an insufficient job at stitching up that artery. Sometime later, it started leaking and she had to be rushed to the ER and have another emergency surgery to repair it, but died during that surgery of heart failure.
Who would be held accountable for Amy's death? Jim for shooting her and causing the damage to the artery, or the hospital for not repairing the artery properly? Also, what would happen to Jim now. He shot Amy with the intent of killing her, but since she didn't did then, is it still murder or is it manslaughter or something?
Any help you can give me will be appreciated.
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You are asking a question that is likely, just far too legally complex for anyone here to be able to answer.
What people actually get charged with has to do with what the prosecutor feels they can prove in court. Although it's tempting to say "She's dead! Someone must be responsible for murder!" That's really not how it works. Jim would probably have been charged with something like aggravated assault for the shooting itself, and then, after her death, they could consider adding a manslaughter charge, but they also might decide against if they felt they couldn't convince a judge or jury of a manslaughter charge given the complicating factors of his illness, medication, or the results of the surgery.
Really, the most important thing for you to keep in mind that although we always want there to be blame, the law doesn't exist so we can blame people when bad things happen, it asks the question: What can be proven? Also, heart surgery is risky, and even when the doctors do everything right, people still die after it. They don't have to have fucked anything up for her the surgery to be unsuccessful or for there to be serious complications. If they did actually fuck up, that is an entirely separate legal and civil matter, that would be investigated and pursued separately from the shooting.
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