I already do this. I check the back seats in my mirror compulsively even if my kids aren’t in the van.
But there is science being dropped in the article. Surely, you don’t believe that there is absolutely nothing scientists can tell you about the science of yourself that you don’t know. Come on. Read the article. Do it.
And then, if you still want to believe it can’t happen to you, at least you will speak from a more informed place.
Hentor, I know where you are coming from. I find that Dio is often right about a lot of things, and just because people dislike his style, he is often attacked. I think that isn’t right. But you have to admit that lately, he has been a bit…stranger about his debating style than he used to be. I don’t know if it is because being right so often has gone to his head, or if he just bores with the SDMB sometimes and wants to get folks going (which I don’t think there is anything wrong with that), but something has changed. And he does sometimes say, “I was wrong” after a long ass crazy debate like this one. So even he admits he’s wrong sometimes, you are going to have to admit that, too.
ETA: Dio, I will bet there are plenty of parents that obsessively checked their mirrors to check on their little darlings, and still forgot the kids one day. Being obsessive about the kids doesn’t mean you will never forget.
It is a feature article, not an opinion piece. I understand why you don’t want to read it, though.
So, apparently an article which quotes legal experts, scientists, and plenty of other people closely involved with actual cases in the subject can be handwaved away as an “opinion piece” when you don’t agree with it. Gotcha.
Bricker, I linked Dio to some education on mens rea, and he’s ignored it. So don’t waste your breath.
Dio, I like how you admit that you’ve forgotten about a kid in the car for a brief moment and then insist that you could never forget for a longer period. I have never forgotten even for the briefest of moments, and I admit that there is a possible confluence of circumstances where I become one of those parents (although it’s extremely unlikely). One factor that makes it less likely for me is that I don’t drive to work every day (and neither does my wife), so being in the car with a kid is an unusual event. But there’s certainly not a zero chance of it happening.
Another thing Dio–how seriously do you think people will take your posts about the law or government in the future now that you’ve shown that you don’t undersand the very basics of criminal law?
I know Dio. He is not the most alert guy in the world. He’d leave himself in the car for an hour.
No, I do not think he’d leave his kids in the car, but only because he acknowledges (now) that he knows to double- and triple-check, etc. But I don’t think you lose any parenting points for empathizing with people who’ve done it. Baby-killing apologists? What is this, a tea party? This is not how people fighting ignorance talk to one another.
You can’t actually lose custody of your own children for having empathy for other parents who did not do anything malicious or willful. I think you can even be exasperated with them and sympathetic at the same time.
I don’t see why this thread has to be the train wreck it is. But hell, the babies on restaurant tables thread is like twelve pages long now, so obviously people aren’t the best here at acknowledging gray areas and ambiguities and moving on.
I’m not saying that I’d never forget. I’m not saying that Dio wouldn’t either. I don’t know him. Chances are, however, that he’s entirely correct here. Most people will not do this. In fact, apparently only about 10-15 people in America will do this in any given year, and I’m not ready to believe that the risk is independent of individual differences in attention and focus. The science in that article says nothing about that, and nothing that would contradict Diogenes either, by the way.
So, why are we compelled to force Diogenes to say that he might just do something that he is in actuality very unlikely to do.
Mainly because he’s not saying he’s “very unlikely” to do it, he’s saying it’s “impossible” for him to do it, full stop.
That assertion alone wouldn’t be too difficult to swallow, but then he’s using the contention that it’s “impossible” for him to do it to suggest that there might be more sinister motives behind the parents who were merely “very unlikely” to leave their kids in the car and who actually did it.
In other words, he’s using his own probability blindness to prop up a shaky argument. It’s as if I argued that, since the odds are so long on winning the lottery, anybody who wins it must be using nefarious means to do so.
Translation: Lalala, I can’t hear you! Neener neener!
Okay, then I ask again, how did you even *almost *forget your kid then?
Damn it Dio, now you’ve made me go and agree with Rand Rover. What is this world coming to!?
OK.
The scienter element of the crime refers to what kind of thinking, or intent, you must have in order to be guilty of the crime if you commit the act.
If you flip a switch intending to turn on the living room light, and then discover that some madman has wired up Uncle Louie into a makeshift electric chair that you’ve just turned on, you’re not guilty of any crime.
But that same act – flipping a switch – is murder if you know, ahead of time, that the switch is connected to an electric chair and Uncle Louie is in it.
Some crimes are called “specific intent” crimes because the the definition of the crime includes the requirement that you intend some specific result. Theft, for example, is a specific intent crime: you must intend to take something and deprive the rightful possessor of it. If you accidentally take something, it’s not theft.
Some crimes are called “general intent” crimes because you don’t have to intend for a specific result to occur. You still have to have some culpable mental state, however. Different states handle these questions differently, but here are some common mental states:
[ul]
[li]Reckless – the law can punish someone who acts recklessly and causes a particular result, even if he didn’t intend that result. We might imagine a person who fires a gun into his back yard because he hears a noise. He’s certainly not aiming at anyone; he doesn’t intended to kill anyone. But his conduct dramatically departs from an ordinary person’s standard of careful behavior, and so the law harshly punishes the result of his behavior.[/li][li]Knowingly – the law can even more harshly punish someone who knows his conduct will reasonably cause a bad result. This might apply if our gun-toting homeowner knows there’s a an occupied home directly behind his own, in his line of fire. He still doesn’t intend to hit anyone, but now he’s not just firing into the dark – he’s firing into the dark when he KNOWS, or should know, that there’s something in his way.[/li][li]Negligent – this is a lesser standard; the law will typically treat someone who acts carelessly, but not recklessly, more leniently. Perhaps we might imagine our homeowner out in rural territory, firing at tin cans in the daylight, but failing to ensure that the area behind the cans was blocked off or marked to avoid accidental injury. Negligent conduct departs from an ordinary person’s standard of careful behavior, although not necessarily dramatically. Most often, simple negligence is not criminal; where it is, it’s usually in cases of a heightened duty of care, as a caretaker would have for a child.[/li][/ul]
Finally, there are certain crimes that are called “strict liability” because they don’t require proof of any mental state at all. If you drive a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol content above 0.08%, you’re guilty. The state doesn’t have to prove you intended to drive with that BAC. It doesn’t even have to prove you recklessly drank, not worrying about your BAC, or even that you were negligent about remembering what you drank so as to not know your BAC. Whether you were mistaken, careless, reckless, or intended to do it makes no difference.
We have very few strict liability crimes, because our sense of justice and due process rebels against the idea that we can or should be punished for doing something we didn’t think was wrong.
The crime of causing the death of a child is not a strict liability crime. The state must prove some mental state, depending upon what they’ve chosen to charge you with. Certainly no one believes that these parents intended to cause the deaths of their children.
The standard for “reckless” and “negligent” both depend on determining what the ordinary standard of care is in a given situation. That is, it’s a question of fact: what do we, as society, demand of the reasonable, prudent member of society? A exercise of care that dramatically deviates from that is reckless; one that deviates but not dramatically is negligent.
There is no rock-solid, per se rule in law that says, “Forgetting your baby in the car is negligent.” Certainly, a jury could decide it was, based on the specifics of the case. But a jury could also decide, “It could happen to anyone,” and that while tragic, it simply wasn’t the kind of departure from a reasonable person’s actions that would make it criminal.
Nice analogy Duke (really, no snark intended).
Thanks!
It hasn’t happened in a long time, largely because the very few times it did happen were enough to scare me into compulsive checking. The times it did happen were because I was highly distracted by something else-- a cell phone call from work, a Vikings game on the radio – even so, the lapse was never been for more than literally a few seconds, and I never actually walked away from the vehicle.
This is specious. The statutes say it’s illegal.
The burden of proving a crime is on the prosecution. You keep saying it’s a crime and you claim to have “pointed out the law” to us. You keep demanding cites from others that it is NOT a crime.
What appears below is every quote from you in this thread suggesting there is a crime. Nowhere do I see a single cite from you to any authority or any analysis of a crime beyond your own speculation or thought as to what you think the law ought to be.
Please cite legal authority and apply that law to the facts to show a crime. Thank you.
That burden is met as soon as it’s indisputibly established that the defendant left a baby in the car. Leaving a baby in the car is explicitly, stautorily illegal. State of mind is irrelevant. The charge is not “crimninal negligence,” the crime is leaving a baby in a car.
That’s not a cite.
I’m pretty sure this is true in CA, and probably so in other states. But is it explicitly illegal to leave a child in a car in all 50 states? Could be-- I’m just asking.
Not a cite for what? Are you unaware of the statutes specifically making it illegal to leave a baby alone in a car? It is not necessary to have a discussion over whether that act specifically falls under some other broader definition of criminal negligence. That stautes take the work out of that by simply making it specifically, explicitly illegal to leave a baby in the car, period.
I am completely unaware of any such statutes. Please kindly provide a cite. Thanks in advance.