I wonder how many of those in favor of prosecution are actually parents?
I think it’s difficult for non-parents to really understand the full-time 24/7/365 constancy of raising kids. ALL of us have been inattentive or distracted for a moment. For the overwhelming majority of us, getting distracted means we find our kid 10 feet away looking at a toy. But for some poor parent, it means finding them with a gorilla.
I think it’s analogous to the way non-pilots react when a pilot forgets to lower his landing gear. According to the NASA reports, this happens about 2 - 3 times as often as hot car child deaths. Non-pilots find it incomprehensible that someone would forget their landing gear, and strongly believe they would never make this mistake. For them, flying the plane would be unique and new, and forgetting a vital step is unimaginable. But for the guy driving the plane day in and day out, the gear is one of a zillion tasks done hundreds or thousands of times a year, and experienced pilots don’t find this so improbable. Humans are fallible.
These same risks apply to parents. As a parent, you’ll give 2 or 3 thousand baths, shepherd them in and out of cars 10 to 20 thousand times, and cook something close to 15,000 meals for them. And as a parent, you will overlook some things. Period. To the non-parent, the kid is something out of the ordinary, and like the airplane example above, they believe that forgetting about something on a hot stove, or running bathwater, or a kid in the back seat is impossible. Trust me, it ain’t. If you’ve driven off with a latte on your roof, or forgotten to lock your door, or lost your phone, the potential exists for you to forget something that has tragic results.
If you’re so perfect that there’s absolutely no way you could make a serious error, then you need to contact my fundie relatives. They’ve been waiting anxiously for you to return.
What would make sense, is making it compulsory for cars to have a sensor that tracks movement or sound inside the car once the key is out of the lock, given a certain outside temperature range. That would make it impossible to leave a kid or a pet inside a car without alerting bystanders. I see no downsides to that.
I am a parent, and I favor prosecution for negligent accidents causing severe harm to others, whether they be hot-car killings, or careless gun discharges, or anything else.
But those are not tragic results.
If the situation is such that your actions can produce devastating harm to your child, you damn right should be taking more care than you do with a latte. Each and every time.
I am a parent of two. I should say I’m not sure I would characterize my opinion as favoring prosecution because I think we ultimately have too many people in jail, but I certainly think that should be the default assumption given our current laws, and a fatal act of negligence.
While all of what you wrote is true, don’t you think that failure of imagination, for example, exists for non gun owners to gun owners? Isn’t it hard to imagine why someone would ever leave a loaded gun in the reach of a child? Isn’t it hard to imagine why someone would sell or do drugs, or why someone would drive drunk, etc., etc. There are lots of examples of people who cannot imagine the circumstances that lead someone to be negligent, but that doesn’t excuse a potential crime.
But we don’t punish you for potential crimes, just the ones you commit. I agree that such a thing could potentially happen to me just like I would be capable of committing all sorts of crimes given a set of circumstances. That alone doesn’t excuse my crimes.
I say it because what you said implies we can control things more than perhaps we can. By saying people should be more careful when the stakes are so high, implies automatic culpability of one has an accident.
Some accidents, even tragic ones, have no culpability. It’s a tragedy and someone is responsible (in that they did it), but not culpable (in that it was completely unavoidable).
We should do a poll. My guess is that the majority of pro-prosecution people are probably parents. You don’t hear non-parents say stuff like, “I’ve raised four kids and never ONCE have I left any of them in a hot car!” As a non-parent, I can imagine myself doing all kinds of accidental fucked-up things to my kid because is all abstract to me.
I don’t know how I feel about prosecution. I think entirely too many people are thrown in jail as it is. But a part of me leans brickbacon’s way. If I’m so stressed out about work and home that my concentration is poor, and I accidentally go the wrong way on an exit ramp and kill/injure people, I’d expect to be hit with a reckless driving charge, at the very least. Even though I did not intend to do anything wrong. I don’t think people would hear my story and say, “She’s been punished enough. Leave her alone.”
So I really don’t have a problem not prosecuting these kind of parents. But we should be consistent. If the kids-baking-in-cars can be chalked up to the hectic lifestyles of modern times, then we should be applying a similar variance to a swath of other crimes.
I don’t think anyone is saying is a “oh, well, my life is so busy I can’t be expected to remember where my kids are”. What’s being said is that how brains are hardwired, sometimes when someone breaks from routine, your brain doesn’t always compensate.
Personally I think parents would split on such a poll. There are some parents who are either so terrified of that happening or so confident in their abilities that they cannot imagine ever “excusing” such a behavior. Other parents who maybe have had some parenting scare or who have a “there but for the grace of god go I” mentality may be more forgiving. Personally for me, I fall in the latter category. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve seen truly wonderful parents make mistakes that I feel more understanding of how such an accident could occur without there being negligence. However I also feel every case should be investigated thoroughly, because the the thought of someone doing this purposefully, hiding behind an “I forgot excuse”, and going unpunished is repulsive to me.
But it is clear to me that the hectic lifestyles of modern existence are the ultimate cause of these tragedies. People have their morning routines they perform on automatic because they are mentally juggling a bunch of other stuff. Our concentration is being diverted every which kind of way nowadays. Coupled with the fact we spend so much time in our cars, it’s no wonder (at least to me) that these things happen.
And what is the purpose of prosecuting in cases where it’s an accident? Punishment? Separation of dangerous people from society?
There isn’t a punishment that a court can’t impose on someone that rivals losing a child and generally it’s a waste of jurist’s time to prosecute for this reason.
Incarceration? How does spending tax money on this endeavor help society? Taking a breadwinner away from a family just puts additional financial burdens on society.
Is this even a question? I think the idea that you can leave a kid in a locked car, have them die or get seriously injured, and get away with no criminal charges because you claim to be sad is pretty sick. You don’t leave a kid locked in a car. This is not complicated. If your memory is so awful that you can’t remember that there’s a kid locked in your car, then you aren’t mentally competent to take care of kids.
I wonder how many of the people saying that you shouldn’t be prosecuted for killing your kid this way are also in favor of holding the owner of a gun or pool responsible if a kid goes into the pool or gets access to the gun and injures/kills themselves or someone else? It just seems bizzare that locking a kid into a hot car and leaving them there should be A-OK legally, but if a kid breaks into someone’s yard and drowns in the pool that person is terrible and should face prosecution and/or have to pay money to the parents.
I wonder why anyone would seriously think ‘oh, you’re not a parent, you wouldn’t understand’ is a valid excuse for negligent homicide.
As a parent myself, I am fairly certain that this is not what is meant.
As I read it what is meant is this;
There is no mercy in the law in and of itself, however at some key steps in the process of investigating these types of deaths, there are individuals within the legal and judicial system who have (or perhaps should have) discretion over whether or not to further pursue criminal charges against the responsible parties. These people are presumed to have some knowledge of the circumstances of the incident, the general background (prior problems of similar nature etc.) and what have you. Sometimes charges result in which case it goes to a jury to decide who have collective discretion to convict or not.
This discretion is an important part of the judicial process especially in cases like this.
My mother-in-law lost her first born to drowning. He was 4 at the time, she lived next to the river that runs through town. She thought he was napping when he had gotten out of bed, used a small step-stool to reach the lock on the screen door, toddled out and fell into the river.
35 years later the merest mention of him still sends her to her bedroom for a week in a pit of guilt, regret, depression and it takes her months to fully recover.
The incident was investigated as a crime, no charges were filed at the discretion of the prosecuting attorney but she did end up getting divorced over it and local construction codes were changed for homes built within a certain distance of the river to help prevent such things from happening.
The human brain is not a perfect machine. These kinds of failures of memory and attention are going to happen regardless of how harshly you set the punishment.
The answer is not to prosecute people but to structure technology and society in a way to make these malfunctions less likely to happen or for them to be caught in time.
The idea that punishment is a solution to human problems is a bad idea.
It’s what I said in my reply. It sounded like “darn, my life is so hectic I forgot my kid”, which I think minimizes what is actually happening. It makes it sound like a ridiculous excuse. I get that you didn’t mean it that way, but that was how it came off to me.
Modern life, hectic or not, is what sets these situations up. The person may not have 1000x things on their mind and that leads them to make a mistake when their routine changes. A person can just be having a normal day, with a small change in routine, that can lead to tragedy.
I knew someone who usually dos pick up but that day did drop off and drove all the way to work. He had his book bag in the back seat, turned to grab it, and there was baby. His morning wasn’t any more chaotic or hectic than normal, (or really at all) just different. He was stunned and terrified what he had done and how easy it almost was.
It isn’t even modern life. It used to be your toddler falling into the fire. How could anyone let that happen. But fireplaces were common things, and toddlers are busy and trip, and when you are trying to get the bread baked, you take your eye off them for a minute and boom. Or one who gets trampled by a horse - what were they even doing in the barn? (My mother’s was the cousin who fell out of the hayloft. My father’s was the cousin who drowned.)
I suspect we’ve gotten less tolerant of parenting accidents because so few are made. Life is safer. And LESS hectic. One hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, it wasn’t than uncommon to lose a child to an accident. And some accidents were lack of parental oversight, or the mother having a hectic life. You had other things to do in order to run the farm than watch your children ever single minute - and most people who canned enough green beans to get a family through the winter understood that.
What I don’t get is why cars don’t come with some sort of simple ventilation system to keep the temperatures from rising and the air circulating when the car is turned off. It doesn’t seem to me (as a non-engineer) to be an insurmountable engineering problem.
That’s not the argument. The argument is that the court cannot punish the parent beyond the loss. It’s a waste of time.
If you don’t understand that then maybe you could provide a legal scenario and describe how it plays out. There are enough lawyers here who can walk you through it.