It’s pretty long, but a few points I’ve managed to pick out include:
Parents who leave their kids in cars are prosecuted roughly half the time, and are usually convicted. Sometimes they are sentenced to community service, etc. In cases where the action was intentional, or there were aggravating factors such as alcohol use, all of these events resulted in prosecutions.
Fathers seem to be given more leeway in not being prosecuted than mothers, other relatives, or non-family members.
White collar types are significantly less likely to be prosecuted than blue collar types.
After being convicted, appeals courts rarely overturn the convictions.
I think this article highlights that the decision to prosecute is very subjective, and that subjectivity may be leading to unfair outcomes.
You’ve left a very important detail out about taking care of an infant on a day to day basis vs. a parent, which is self evident to parents who do this on a daily basis which seems pretty relevant here. An infant, weighing under 20 pounds, falling asleep in a rear facing car seat is invisible to the driver and therefore much easier to forget about than a parent weighing 200 pounds and sitting right next to you.
One of the parents in the Fatal Distraction article is a perfect example of this. Everyone should read the entire article, but here’s how it happened to her:
If *any *single thing had been different, then baby Bryce would still be alive. If Bryce hadn’t been sleeping, Balfour would have heard him. If the baby had been in the normal car seat, he would have been behind the passenger seat. If the babysitter didn’t have a new phone number, she would have been able to call Balfour sooner. There are likely hundreds of parents having identical mornings to Balfour, where the routine is off, but one thing doesn’t line up, and so the baby is noticed and not forgotten in the backseat. Balfour just had the very unfortunate luck of everything lining up in the worst way so that the baby was forgotten.
I think this thread is a perfect example of why that wouldn’t work, because a lot of people think it could never happen to them, so there’s not a demand for it.
Well my thinking is that for the vast majority of the time if you forget your baby somewhere, the baby is going to be okay. There’s an example in Fatal Distraction, where a baby is forgotten, but it’s both parents forgetting to pick the baby up at the end of the day, not forgetting the baby in the car at the beginning of the day. I’m sure plenty of other parents have done the same. If you forget your baby at daycare or at home or even at the store, chances are high that someone will notice and take care of the baby until you are called and there won’t be tragic results.
However, if you leave your gun lying around, most of the time things will still probably be okay, but chances are higher that something bad could happen. If someone notices a baby sitting around somewhere, their instinct is to take care or get help for the baby. But if someone notices a gun lying around, for some people, kids especially, the instinct might be to play with it.
Accidental gun deaths from a gun lying around should be investigated just like a baby left in a car should be. If it is one of the unfortunate “Swiss cheese model” incidents, where everything just lines up wrong, like it’s the one time you leave your gun out, and your brother’s apartment is having AC issues and he has a key to your place so he came over to crash with his son while the AC is being worked on, and whatever else lined up badly so that your nephew was able to accidentally shoot himself, then I would definitely be lenient on punishment.
I’m an engineer, and I can imagine that maybe being done, but definitely not cheaply. There are much more cost effective ways of saving lives related to car safety.
I agree. Some of the parents who it has happened to have said that before it happened they couldn’t understand how parents could do it, and couldn’t imagine it ever happening to them, until it did. Of course, this is still very rare, and so the vast majority of parents who think “that could never happen to me” will be right in that it won’t happen to them.
Well 99.99% of parents won’t leave their kid in a hot car to die, but will forget their kids somewhere else, or leave something dangerous within kids reach, or take their eyes off their kids while near a pool, or near a road, or while cooking, or something else. The vast majority of times, nothing bad will happen, and the kid will be taken care of, or the dangerous thing will be noticed before the kid can grab it, or the kid will keep playing and not run out into a road. *Every *parent makes mistakes, most are fortunate in that the consequences or injuries are minimal and non-deadly.
This is very true. And yet, I have an understanding of how one can lose track of said 200 pound adult making me even more understanding of how one can lose track of a 20 pound child.
I’m one of the parties urging compassion towards the adults involved in these cases, unless malice can be proven. I’m not one of the condemning parties.
Have you ever made a mistake? Have you ever made a mistake that could have had serious consequences but, through pure dumb luck, didn’t?
I suspect everyone has. I know I have. Just a couple examples: There the time I knew the parking brake was on, but it wasn’t. Or the time I knew I threw the breaker but hadn’t (thinking back, I can still see myself throwing it… even though I know I didn’t).
Luckily, in those situations no one got hurt through pure luck.
I have twins, 10 months old. My wife and I are existing on little to no sleep, though she gets less than I do. The first 6 months were crazy and we were both zombies half the time. There are, at times, an almost overwhelming amount of tasks to get done. Get off from work, rush home, get the boys in the car seats, get the diaper bag, get the stroller, get the car seats in the car, oh shit, forgot the checkbook, crap work is calling, shit the traffic is backed up and were going to be late, dang, baby needs a bottle, shit did you lock the door. Etc.
All with 3 hours sleep or less if the boys had a bad night.
I can understand how people make this mistake. The idea of this happening to my boys terrifies me. Luckily, pretty much every time we go out my wife is along so it makes making this kind of mistake that much harder. However, I can fully understand how it happens.
Gosh, I definitely don’t want to envision your specific twins in this situation, but your points made me realize I don’t think I’ve ever heard about this accidentally happening with twins (or two small children) – I wonder if it is less likely because twins take up more space (there’s more car seat to catch out of the corner of your eye) or maybe two kids are less likely to be sleeping/silent for a long enough stretch of time that they don’t alert the driver.
You’re already hinting at the clear and obvious answer: it totally depends on the specific circumstances. As in any potential criminal prosecution, the means of death is irrelevant – what is relevant is the role of factors like intent or criminal negligence. There is certainly an implication that the person leaving the child(ren) in a hot car was negligent or worse, but whatever the person may or may not be guilty of needs to be established in court and then punished (or not) accordingly. There’s no general answer of the kind you ask for. If there was, you’d have a pathway to gross miscarriages of justice.
Broomstick, I apologize, when I read what you posted, I didn’t register the part where you said similar, not same.
My point wasn’t that people don’t have any idea unless they are parents themselves, it was that the notion that these types of incidents should be automatically prosecuted as criminal acts and the parents convicted as being a notion that is inhumane, lacking in sympathy and/or empathy, legalistic and ultimately detrimental to our society and culture as a whole (as compared to how it is now) and that unless you are a parent, no matter how much care-taking experience you have, you don’t know. Baby sitting, even for weeks at a time, gives a little insight, but not the whole or true picture, end of life care for a dying (grand)parent (specially one suffering alzheimers, I know from personal experience) can give you more insight, but again, the end results and known expectations are so opposite that I find it difficult to make many direct comparisons. The emotions and elations and terrors and expections society has of you as a parent and you have of your children and so on and so on…
Like I said, its sort of like the difference between being married and merely living together. The difference is small seeming, maybe just a piece of paper, but the implications and realities are huge.
Appropriately, my youngest (18 months) child’s daycare center is closed this week, and I am taking him to a different one near my work for the week. My wife usually does his drop off.
Yesterday afternoon, I left work and headed home. Completely forgetting him at daycare because I went into autopilot mode.
Obviously much better than leaving him in the car; I mean, he ended up getting extra snacks and story time. But still, so very easy to mess up when you are used to doing the same thing day in and day out.
I’m not sure how the people arguing that those who accidentally leave their kids in the car must be evil people who don’t care about their kids arrived at their conclusion, but the belief that honest mistakes don’t happen is just too stupid for words.
It’s worth mentioning that Yo-Yo Ma once left his prized $2.5MM cello in a cab:
I am absolutely convinced though, that anyone who is not a robot, and thinks they are absolutely incapable of an act of tragic forgetfulness is deluding themselves.
Who here has said that? You’re arrived at a fallacious conclusion of your own.
Ditto. No one has said this.
Some of us are saying that even honest mistakes can be criminally negligent. You can’t leave a child to die, and get free of the criminal liability with the excuse, “Oh, I forgot,” even if that is a true excuse. Having care and custody of children means not forgetting, and the law exists to punish those who do.
What was the news coverage like of such hot-car deaths, say, 60 years ago? Coverage of such deaths seems to have grown greatly in the past decade, but surely such things happened decades ago as well - the Sun wasn’t any cooler back then than it is now.
This thread reminds me of how my mother once punished me for “not hearing” her say something. If someone doesn’t hear something, they didn’t hear it. Punishment doesn’t improve the auditory system in any physical way.
In the same way, you can’t punish people into having better memory - if they are already reasonably non-negligent folks.
Kids used to be able to sit in the front seat back then. Front airbags made it very dangerous to place infants in the front seat.
Now kids are automatically strapped into comfy, padded, rear child seats that lull them to sleep in minutes.
ETA: And besides, people weren’t as harried back then and didn’t have multiple distractions like daycare, cellphones, work deadlines. It’s a different world.
My boys crash as soon as we start driving. I have mirrors so I can see the boys in the backwards facing car seat.
However, it is the lack of sleep +multitasking which scares me.
This week I have a major project at work which means 10 to 12 hour days. Last night I was woken up three times, so not much sleep. I am pretty wrecked and by Friday I will be really wrecked.
Luckily my wife is a stay at home Mom so a lot of the running around to daycare and the like aren’t part of my day. However if she worked I’d be terrified of leaving the boys in the car due to too many things going on and shear exhaustion.