‘Good Samaritan’ Laws Are Hard to Enact, Experts Say

Jeremy Strohmeyer’s decision to plead guilty to the murder of Sherrice Iverson may prevent an angry and outraged public from getting a full airing of the role played by his friend David Cash.

Controversy has swirled around Cash’s failure to come to the girl’s aid or to report Strohmeyer’s action to police. But changing the laws to require people to help others--the goal espoused by many of those who have denounced Cash--would be far more difficult than many seem to believe, legal experts say.

Prosecutors have repeatedly said that unless Cash is shown to have encouraged or somehow aided Strohmeyer, he cannot be charged with a crime under Nevada law. Despite some suggestions Tuesday by Strohmeyer’s defense attorney, Leslie Abramson, that Cash was a “co-perpetrator” of the murder, prosecutors say that so far they have seen no evidence that would warrant charges.

A few states have passed laws to require citizen intervention when someone faces great harm. But those statutes have had only limited success, according to legal experts, who say the effort shows the difficulty of legislating moral behavior.

The experts differ somewhat on how many states have so-called Good Samaritan laws. Only four appear to have broad statutes establishing a legal duty to help those in danger. In Vermont, one of those states, such a law has been on the books since 1967, but officials say they know of no instance in which it has been employed.

“I have been in this state 20 years, and I can’t recall a case where we used this statute,” said John T. Quinn, chairman of the executive board for Vermont’s county prosecutors.

The law says a person who sees another in grave danger must help to the extent he can without putting himself in danger. Violating the law carries a $100 fine.

‘It Is a Real Void in the Law’

Laws that require citizens to report crimes are “difficult to word because you need to be able to show that the person knew almost to a certainty that a crime was occurring,” Quinn said.

Many European countries require citizens to assist others in peril.

But in California--as in most other states--”you could sit on the beach and watch a toddler walk into the wave and drown and not do anything, and you would not be under any . . . obligation,” said Peter Keane of the Hastings School of Law in San Francisco.

“It is a real void in the law,” he said. There is a “real divide seen by society between legal obligation and moral obligation.”

In an era of draconian criminal laws, many may find it surprising that so few legislatures have passed bills requiring citizens to report crimes or intervene to save another’s life.

In fact, films and television have implied the opposite. In the final episode of the wildly popular “Seinfeld” TV series, the title character and his friends were jailed and tried for failing to stop a mugging.

In the real world, by contrast, “all someone has to say is: ‘I didn’t want to get involved,’ ” noted Stanford University law professor Marc Franklin. “That is traditional American and English law as well. There is no affirmative duty to go to the rescue of someone,” either in civil or criminal law, he said.

There are several exceptions. Parents have a legal obligation to protect their children, and husbands and wives must help each other in moments of peril. But “mere friendship”--let alone simply a moral obligation to the world at large--has never imposed such a duty, UCLA law professor Peter Arenella said.

“In essence, the criminal law in this country tends to overvalue a notion of individual rights and autonomy to keep your noses out of other people’s business, even when the other person is risking a serious social harm,” he said.

In one famous case from the turn of the century, a couple spent the weekend together, and one of the partners fell into an alcohol- and drug-induced coma. The other simply walked out and let him die, said Arthur Leavens, a professor at Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, Mass.

“The Michigan Supreme Court said, ‘Fine, there is no legal duty,’ ” said Leavens, who published an article on the legal debate in a California law journal.

Several reasons underlie this tradition.

One is concern that any Good Samaritan-type law would cover too many problematic cases. “It is very difficult to craft a law which has the effect we want and isn’t capable of being misapplied,” Leavens said. “The Cash case is an example in which the need cries out, but I think those cases are relatively few and far between.”

He said resistance to such laws commonly stems from a sense “that we don’t want, as a matter of law, to turn into informants on each each. . . . I don’t know that a general duty to report a crime is such a great idea.”

Bill Requires Reporting Sexual Assault of Child

Stanford’s Franklin said Good Samaritan laws might win more support if they were limited to requiring aid to a child--one of the proposals being considered in Nevada.

“Some people might rebel against a . . . general statute, whereas people might say a child is helpless,” Franklin said.

“What I have heard occasionally is that if you are required to do something good, it demeans the moral dimension of what you are doing,” he said.

Sherrice’s murder, however, may have moved public sentiment enough to pass more Good Samaritan laws.

A Nevada legislator, for example, has introduced a state bill that would make it a felony for an adult to witness the sexual assault of a child and fail to report it. Some legislators in California and on the federal level have called for a similar law.

How such a statute might actually have worked in the Iverson case remains a matter of debate. Cash might have reported the murder once he learned of it if the law obligated him to do so, but a legal duty to assist the girl probably would not have saved her life, insists Mark Werksman, Cash’s lawyer.

“He didn’t know when he left the bathroom that Jeremy was going to kill her,” Werksman said. “. . . He didn’t know that there was going to be a crime to report.

“It is easy now to look back and say he should have done this or he should have done that, but if you put yourself in his shoes that night, you too might have left that bathroom without fear that a murder would occur,” Werksman added.

Cash told The Times that he entered the bathroom of the Nevada casino and found Strohmeyer in a stall holding the girl and muffling her cries. He said he told his friend to let the girl go and then left the restroom. When the friends saw each other shortly thereafter, Strohmeyer told him he had killed Sherrice, Cash said.

Even if the law cannot punish Cash, public outrage may. Protests have been held at UC Berkeley, where Cash is a student, and many of his fellow students are reportedly shunning him.

Times staff writer Max Vanzi contributed to this story.