The judge was charged with negligent homicide. The jury vote was deadlocked twice. I’m not sure what criteria they were instructed to use.
because it’s an accident. There’s no intent. This would differ from someone who deliberately left the child in the car while they stop somewhere to do something.
If I accidentally ran over a someone because I failed to fucking look, would that not be a crime? I’m not trying to be snarky. I really don’t know.
It might not be a crime.
What caused you to fail to look?
If it is not your usual routine to have the child with you, it is entirely possible to conduct your usual routine and just not remember that you have your child with you if the child is sleeping/silent. Your brain just slips into your routine and you drive/park go to work because you are thinking about your day, what you need to get done how to deal with a work problem Etc, while you auto pilot your usual routine. My heart breaks for these situations. Those who leave their kids on purpose, though, there is a special place in hell for them.
If I understand this case correctly, it’s because I forgot.
So if it’s not my usual routine to be driving and I forgot to look and ran over some one, it’s not a crime?
Not every crime requires intent. I am not saying every one of these cases should be prosecuted or punished with jail time, but this notion that it shouldn’t be prosecuted because it was an accident is largely irrelevant as is the fact that the parent feels bad.
Anecdotally, I don’t think most of these cases result in jail time. But here’s the real issue here. Take two scenarios in which parent leaves a kid in the car. In one, the kid is injured, but eventually rescued by the police, and in the other the kid dies. I think most would be fine punishing the first parent in some way. Why not the second? We punish crimes, not how bad people feel after they commit them. I think allowed prosecutors to use discretion tends to work well enough. Certainly it would not be a good thing to have a blanket rule that negligence that leads to someone’s death would never be a crime. That makes no sense.
If it’s not your usual route and you got lost and were scanning road signs and missed looking as someone stepped into the crosswalk, yes it might not be a crime.
With someone who drives drunk &/or texts & then kills someone it’s an appropriate thing to do because they are conscious decisions. One chooses to go out & drive vs. public transit or a taxi home; one chooses to pick up their phone in the car. It’s my understanding in most of these cases it’s a tragically accidental oversight. Before it happened to these parents, they never thought it could happen to them & it’s not like they “did” anything wrong; they had an awful brain fart. I’m not sure how well the message would resonate with others.
Depends on the jurisdiction, I suppose. I was addressing how it can hapen, and how it has no intent. This is clearly a personal thing for you. Were you criminally prosecuted for your incident or was it a civil case? These are two different things.
But that is basically what negligence and recklessness are. It may not always rise to a criminal level, but many times these cases are not prosecuted. Keep in mind that these are fairly rare occurrences relatively to the number of times kids get in and out of cars everyday. Why can people collectively remove their children from hot cars millions of times a day, yet a handful of people cannot? I don’t think most of them intended to do it, but they are almost by definition not exercising the reasonable care a prudent person would, and that alone is prosecutable. Again, I am not saying every one of these case should be prosecuted, but what is the alternative to treating these things on a case by case basis? Are we just gonna say that you can kill a child in a car with no consequences due to the fact that it was an accident and you feel bad?
You can do the same act a thousand times and never have a problem and then the thousand and oneth time something just doesn’t click. Most of the time the thing you mess up on is not life threatening but every so often it maybe. The completely random nature of who this happens to should be a sign that sometimes shit just happens.
There are cases that should be prosecuted. Deliberately leaving a kid in the car to go inside a store is an example.
A baby mirror like this would help. Especially if the driver glanced back at the baby during the trip. Less likely to forget the baby is in the car.
http://m.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=41270196&gclid=CPy4sMuKz84CFQOMaQodUSQAiA&camp=PLAPPCG-_-PID18939560:BRUS&cagpspn=plab_18939560&eESource=CAPLA_DF:41270196:TRUS
No consequence?? What an idiotic statement. There is a consequence. Your dead child. A punishment worse than anything the government can deliver.
Hard to say I’ve read the Fatal Distraction article and I have kids and I still don’t really understand how you forget your kid is in the car with you, maybe its cause I only have one carseat now and its in the rear passenger so I can always see it in the rearview mirror, also my car windows aren’t tinted so if I get out of the car and look through the glass I can still see if the kid is inside, I still just can’t fathom simply forgetting the kid is back there. To me it feels like not prosecuting is saying the parent did nothing wrong and the kid’s life didn’t really matter.
Alternatively if you only prosecute people who intentionally leave the kid in the car and not those ‘‘that just forgot’’, it seems like an incentive for people who left them intentionally to make up some convoluted lie about forgetting the kid to get out of charges. I think its probably best to prosecute, it has to be one of the worst pains a parent could endure but even as a parent I don’t think its an excuse, your kid isn’t an iPod or laptop they are a human being and their life matters, people should be held accountable for their actions, I’m not saying the court shouldn’t have mercy on the parent, and look at individual circumstances, each case has to be scrutinized individually but I think a blanket policy of non-prosecution isn’t in society’s benefit and is dangerous.
Clearly I meant criminal consequences as every crime committed by a non sociopath affects the person in some way. But let’s play this game. What if I leave my grandchild in the car? Is the grandchild’s death punishment enough? Or what about a kid I’m babysitting that I love like my own child? How close does the victim need to be, and how demonstrably bad must the person feel to avoid prosecution?
I am not saying we should let feel for these people, but I think people are swayed just based on the fact that these people are more relatable than your average felon, when the reality is that many criminals are decent people who made mistakes. At a certain point, you can’t just give people a pass because they feel really bad about what they did.
I strongly believe that every case should be investigated thoroughly. If there is any thought that it was intentional or in a case of exceptional negligence (under the influence of alchol/drugs etc) the case should be brought to a jury and decided in our judicial system. All I am trying to convey is that I can see a clear path to an otherwise great parent having this happen due to a deviation in normal routine and in that case, I am hard pressed to prosecute them.
What do you think is the chance that you, or any other reasonable and prudent person, might forget your baby is in the car? It cannot be zero, although of course for any reasonable and prudent person it is a very small number. Can you think of any possible circumstances in which this might occur?
Imagine you’re on your way to work, you’re already running late, your wife normally drives your child around, but that today she’s out of town so you’ve got the kid and your mother is in the hospital, just got diagnosed with brain cancer and is about to have surgery, and you went to visit her last night and are worried your father is developing dementia because he kept getting lost in the hospital, and your boss seems to think you’re taking too much time off to deal with this and it’s affecting your work and you’ll really be fucked if you get fired now…damn it there’s no parking here so you have to go down the block and now you’ll be late…finally finding a parking spot, you grab your bag from the passenger seat and dash into the office.
Perhaps 1 in 100,000,000? 1 chance in 100 million that circumstances will conspire to cause a particular chain of events that cause you to forget, just once, for a few hours on this particular day, that you had your kid in the car this morning?
Well, that sort of thing will happen a few hundred times a year, in a country of 300,000,000 people.
What is the point of punishing these people for what amounts to, essentially, very bad luck?
But such deviations happen all the time. Whether it’s causing a fatality while speeding or leaving a loaded gun out. Having committed a crime doesn’t mean you are a bad person, and being deemed a bad person isn’t what should determine whether you are prosecuted. Do you really want a system where prosecution is determined based on the sympathy of the perpetrator? Do you think that such a system can ensure equal treatment? Because I see a system where such determinations are already too subjective, allowing biases to creep in.
Sure. But I can think of circumstances where I might get addicted to painkillers then develop an addiction to illegal drugs. I can imagine a circumstance where I hurt someone who hurt my kid. I can fully acknowledge that there is a non-zero chance that I might do lots of things that might end up with me being jailed.
Or imagine you a poor kid who was basically forced to join a gang to ensure your own safety, then you end up being present for a murder you didn’t commit, and the prosecutor decides to charge you will several crimes related to your involvement. Few paths to criminality are beaten by people who are just heartless evil people. It make be a series of mistakes rather than one, but the point is that we cannot have a system that decides criminal culpability based largely on whether you are not a “good person”.
But it’s not just pure luck. Clearly the person didn’t exercise due care. This is partly why I have never heard of someone killing more than one kid in separate incidents, or even a close friend or family member doing this after someone they are close to died in that way. Surely if such a thing were random luck, the above would have happened, no? People have won the lottery multiple times since it really is random. Why doesn’t the same guy allow his kids to bake in a car twice? Mostly because are exercising greater care in the future.
Leaving a kid in the car isn’t like having a piano fall on your head while walking down the street. A person actively made a fatal mistake even in the best of circumstances. It doesn’t mean every case should result in jail time or prosecution, but I just cannot get behind this idea that mistakes cannot be crimes. I doubt you would be saying that if some careless driver whose wife was out of town, whose mother has cancer… killed your kid with their car while driving. You’d likely see their excuses as just that.