I was reading a story on the YAHOO news site and can’t understand something about this story.
The story is about a teenage mother who was charged with manslaughter after her baby died as the result of a dog attack.
My problem is that I can’t understand who it was that she is charged with killing. Surely it’s not the baby. Is it? She can’t have been charged with going outside for a minute while the dog mauled and killed her baby.
I figured that maybe she went temporarily insane and killed a neighbor who was the owner of the dog. But the story doesn’t say who owned the dog. The story doesn’t seem to be very well written to me. I mean, it doesn’t really lay out the facts in a way that is easy to understand.
The more I think about this, the more I get the ugly feeling that the mother was charged as the result of the death of her baby. But that just doesn’t make sense to me. Does it make sense to you?
Sounds to me more like negligent homicide than manslaughter, but then, I’m not a lawyer. But it’s pretty clear there’s a crime here: Because of the mother not paying close enough attention to her kid, the kid died.
She’s being charged with killing the baby. No good reason has been offered for why she left a baby alone in a house with an attack dog, and her story doesn’t add up. This may sound draconian, but society expects parents to put the children’s needs first.
I get a real kick of the recent trend by people to take common sentence fragments they use frequently and put them down in the form of an acronym. I have done it myself with a fragment like “as far as I’m concerned” - AFAIC - and I just expect people to be able to figure out what they mean.
I couldn’t figure out IANAL and I had to look it up in Wiki. But I found it with no problem. It also lists TINLA - “this is not legal advice”.
I think the story makes it perfectly clear that the 17 year old mother has been charged with manslaughter, the victim is her little baby, and the reason that she is being charged is because she left her baby alone and it was mauled to death by a dog.
If someone left their baby unattended in a closed car for a few minutes on a hot day and the child died, they’d probably be in the same situation and subject to some kind of criminal charge for the negligent death of their kid.
Without knowing the kind of dog? It will surely make a big difference if the dog is a large attack dog or a relatively small lap dog.
But, even if the mother stayed in the same room with the baby and the dog just jumped on the baby and attacked it. If the mother was at one end of the living room and the baby was at the other, I think she would have had a very similar chance to save the baby. The whole thing seems really draconian to me. What’s next? We have to banish all dogs from homes with children under the age of 3?
I am not a lawyer, but I think the prosecutor’s thought process may have been along the lines of: leaving a small child or baby alone with dogs can foreseeably result in the child being injured and/or killed. The mother did nothing to prevent this from happening, and is therefore charged with creating a situation that led to the baby’s death.
OK. But leaving a small child or baby alone in a house can forseeably result in the child being injured and/or killed as the result of an earthquake causing the house to collapse on the baby - crushing it to death. Does that make sense? Would it make sense to charge the mother in those circumstances? What if she lived in a high-frequency earthquake zone where there was a quake yesterday and the government was warning people to be careful of aftershocks today?
The dogs were two Huskies.
ETA: I am not a lawyer, but I don’t think it makes any sense to compare a situation where a baby was left alone with a dog (and died as a result) with a hypothetical earthquake. The two just aren’t comparable.
Nicely done! But gosh, that makes me sad. I love Huskies and used to have one. I can’t imagine a breed of that size less likely to kill an infant for no reason. What a shame!
And yes, I am ready to hear the carping by people who claim I am more saddened due to the breed of the dog than I am by the death of the baby. So, go ahead and let her rip.
[moderating] Joanie, we ask that you make your thread titles descriptive, so that people have some idea what the thread is about without opening it. I’ve changed the title from “Can anyone answer this for me?” to “Negligent manslaughter question (dog/child story on Yahoo),” but we’d appreciate more informative titles in the future.
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In reading other articlesabout the situation, it seems the 17-year old’s story changed a least a little: the baby’s father says she went out for a smoke, but the initial reports were that she was out walking around the garden with the 37 year old. Though that could have been what they were doing while having a cigarette.
I’m not going to defend the charges: I don’t know nearly enough about the situation to do so, nor do I know the law or relevant precedent cases.
Well, that’s why even when people are at home, they’re told to supervise their young children/babies when they’re with dogs. I don’t know if it’s against the law, but it’s a REALLY bad idea to go across the room or upstairs and leave your dog with your baby. Even if it’s “just a lap dog.” To a baby, an attacking dog is an attacking dog. Smaller dogs may do less damage but they can definitely do damage.
And in this case, we do know the dogs were huskies.
Police say a dog turned on the newborn after she had been left unattended with two huskies at the couple’s home in the village of St-Barnabe-Sud, about 65 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
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I also removed the lengthy chunk of copyrighted text from the end of the OP.
Joanie, it’s fine to link to articles elsewhere when you want to ask questions about them, but please don’t cut & paste the whole article into your message.
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Something small and twitchy may trigger any dogs hunting reflex. Hell, a toy poodle could kill a baby, for what it is worth. Some of the worst agressor dogs are little yappy dogs like poodles, poms, chihuahuas. Any one of those could kill an infant.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s any dog breed where you can say it’s unlikely that they’ll kill/bite. Yes, some breeds may have more biters than others. But any breed can have biters, and when you’re leaving a dog with a baby unattended, you’re pretty much asking for trouble.