Plus the car seats are rear-facing. I really think that has far more to do with it than our fast-paced lifestyle.
I once heard an audio recording of a parent who had returned to the car and realized their child was in it and hadn’t survived. I wish I’d never heard the noise that parent made, and I can’t imagine any punishment worse than that living through that moment, and all the moments and years to come. There’s nothing to be served by prosecuting.
This, a hundred times this.
An anecdote (that I’m sure I’ve shared on this board before)…many years ago now, going out for my first shopping expedition after the birth of my second child, I got the 3yr old dressed and ready, myself dressed and ready, collected the shopping bag and the list and headed to the car in the driveway.
Strapped the 3yr old into her car seat, started the car and drove out of the driveway and up the road…when it suddenly occurred to me that I’d FORGOTTEN the newborn.
Now luckily for me he was still fast asleep in his crib, totally unaware of the situation. But I was mortified…how could I FORGET my child? What sort of a mother was I? It took me many weeks to get over that guilt, and only after much counselling by friends who confessed their stuff ups as well.
I was lucky…the kid was at home. But I shudder to imagine what the scenario COULD have been.
By all means, investigate each and every incident of kids in cars to the nth degree. But have some compassion for those parents who are only human afterall and sometimes fuck up, with deadly consequences.
This.
A parent is found passed out inside a bar with dead kid in car=gross negligence and criminal charges.
A parent made a genuine mistake because of many distractions and other influences=negligence, but not criminal gross negligence.
Every case will be fact specific and determine whether charges are or should be filed. And a jury will then determine if the parent is guilty of a crime based on those facts.
I don’t know for sure if it is still this way but if you are over 18 or 21, depending on when the state says you are an adult if you get arrested, even if a mistake in identity, if you were arrested, read your rights and booked into jail, all the expunging and lawyers moves to the contrary, that arrest will forever show when you are checked through the system, like at a traffic stop with computers in the police car.
‘They’ will tell you it is gone and everything will be except that record of being arrested.
The person who was arrested even if the child did not die and he was not even prosecuted, only arrested will have fun getting another good job, a gun permit, anything needing a background check. That arrest will pop up.
Did not happen to you, well wait for 10 years and then have a LEO friend run your info and see if it is still gone.
For all those that want no slack until the prosecution makes a determination need to remember that just a case of mistaken identity will put you in the same boat. Can others bring up the fact that you want this for people who, IYO need to be arrested and investigated. You have to live & die by the same rules. Swords usually have 2 sides, we need to be careful what rules we want.
Many people do not care if you are/were totally innocent, you have an arrest record. You go to the round file because there are many who don’t have one and are looking at the same job or permit or whatever.
Remember, what you can check and what the authorities can check are two different things. What is still available depends on who is asking.
Agreed. Here’s a case where prosecution was justified:
My point was that if you argue leaving a child in a car to die is a random event, it would happen to the same person or related people more than once just by sheer chance.
As noted, no one has said this.
Why is this any worse? Because the person was smoking weed? The criminal act is the part where you strap a kid into a car, then proceed to leave the child to die. What you do once you get out of the car is largely irrelevant. Why is forgetting, then going to work any better than forgetting, then going to watch TV and get baked? Certainly it evokes less sympathy, but the negligent act is the same, as is the excuse. Please tell me why there is a difference in your mind since there seems to be no dispute that it was a genuine accident?
And it was a very different world 30 to 40 years ago (god that makes me feel old) A parent could stop at the store going to or from somewhere to get a few things and leave a car full of kids with the windows down and keys in the ignition and not think a thing of it or get any grief unless the kids were being snotty and doing things like spitting all over the next car over and getting caught by the owner :o
aaaah the “good old days” of free ranging while riding in the car.
Yes this is worse because the person was smoking weed. What you do when you get out of the car is relevant. Smoking weed while having a child in your charge affects greatly the quality of care you provide the child generally, an can be viewed as something that the person did to themselves deliberately that impaired their mental state and cognitive abilities while directly responsible for the child.
That’s a part of the difference between the stoner dad who’s child died in a hot car because he was high and forgot and the dad who’s normal routine was disrupted for whatever reason and left the child in a car because it was a deviation from routine and he was distracted by details from his normal routine.
That’s the circumstance that pushes the situation from terrible to criminal…business dad was trying to accommodate a deviation from routine while doing what he does to provide for his family while stoner dad was acting in a manner that can be characterized as selfish at best and provides no benefit for his family at best (and as noted resulted in an “at worst” situation)
As terrible as it is to leave a child to die in a hot car, the truth is that its the circumstances leading up to that and surrounding that incident that determines if it is criminal or not and sometimes its just not a crime.
ETA regarding your statement about it should happen to a person or related people more than once, while statistically that might be true, I find it to be highly unlikely. A parent that isn’t a psycho path would only make that type of mistake once, and its not something one really ever recovers from, based on what I’ve seen.
There is ZERO evidence the person’s memory or ability to care for the child was affected by the use of weed. None. There seems to be no dispute that this was an honest mistake/accident.
He didn’t forget BECAUSE he was high. He forgot because he forgot. You cannot just assume the drugs were the cause, and it doesn’t make any sense to make that assumption because he got high AFTER leaving the child. In fact, it makes less sense because he was probably still high when he remembered.
And the result is the same. We are punishing the act that led to that result, nothing else. If it’s an honest mistake, it doesn’t matter whether the guy left the car to work, give blood, gamble, or watch TV.
You can make a value judgment that providing for your family is better than smoking weed all day, but that has nothing to do with whether a criminal act was committed. For example, is it worse if I accidentally strike someone with my car because I am exhausted from being overworked than if I exhausted myself staying up late watching Netflix, or training dogs to fight. Certainly the latter makes for a worse person, but the causality of the accident is the same in all the above cases. Does it really matter to you why your dead family member’s killer was exhausted?
Then you either don’t understand the point or are admitting that vigilance can prevent these things from happening, completely undermining the idea that it’s random accident that cannot be prevented because, “the brain is imperfect”. It’s not like being struck by lightning; something that happens to some random, unlucky people multiple times. It’s arranging your life in a way that increases the chances of negligent acts happening. Given the above is true, the same vigilance can be employed before such a tragedy just as it could afterwards.
I truly don’t understand your use of the word “random” here. Nobody is calling it a random event.
It’s usually an accident which by definition is an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally.
“Unexpectedly” and “unintentionally” are pretty much what “random” means here. It implies it could happen to anyone, without warning, unpredictably. You don’t need to stretch it to mean “random” in the purest statistical sense, just random the way you might stub your toe on a chair leg tomorrow.
In my opinion, this is too generous. Stubbing a toe… Yeah, that’s random.
Leaving a child to die? That’s a different kettle of negligence. It isn’t a “random accident,” but wrongdoing, even without intent. It makes one culpable under the law. Not all such cases are prosecuted…but many are, and the conviction rate is significant.
When my son was 2 months old he was getting twice weekly blood pressure checks at the hospital. I was having daily dressing changes for a nonhealing caesarean section incision. One day when I didn’t have him with me, I stopped for groceries. At the check-out line, I thought I’m missing my baby. I abandoned my cart and ran out to the car to find him. Not there! Hysterically I phoned my husband and sure enough, baby was some with Daddy. It was February in Canada, so leaving him in the car would have been as deadly as a hot car in August.
Another time, he was older, and I drove him home from day care, and instead of driving to our house I drove to my parents’ place. When my mother greeted me I got her confused, because she didn’t have today marked as a day to pick him up. Sure enough kiddo was in my car, fast asleep, and just tired me followed the normal routine of picking him up at Mom and Dad’s. (his day care closed at 5 and I usually worked until 7. Today I was only doing an 8 hour shift. I picked him up but drove to Mom’s on autopilot. Of course Mom and Dad lived in the house I lived in for most of my life so in a way, I drove home, not to “my place.”
I get how it happens. I am grateful it never happened to me. I remember being I would never want to be a juror in a case of child left in a hot car. Tired mom/dad brain is scary. Fortunately my brain went to get the baby instead of “baby is safe” when not.
The other thing i haven’t seen in this thread is the idea of daycares calling if the parents don’t bring the child in. I certainly got a phone call if my son was not at daycare. Now that he is older I am one of the the safe arrival parents at my son’s school. Parents who do not call the school to report their child absent get a phone call and a polite reminder to let the school know. Any parent who left their child somewhere accidentally would be aware before 930 am.
Not seeing it. An accident is something done without intent. You don’t randomly cut your hand cutting a bagel. it’s an accident.
Not only am I not seeing it this way, the court doesn’t see it as you describe. They see it in the context of an accident and not a random event.
But as tragic as it is, it’s still pretty rare. On average, 37 kids die each year being left in a car. And not all of those are accidents where the parent has a tragic memory lapse, like mentioned earlier sometimes its kids playing around who get stuck in a car or other circumstances. Also, there are around 23.9 million kids age 0-5 in the US (link to PDF). This is from 2009, but there were 35.7 million households with kids under 18 then.
Someone better at statistics could work it out, but just from the numbers you can see that even if this was a purely random event, it’s very unlikely to happen to you, and even less likely to happen to you twice.
Also, you can’t ignore who the tragedy would affect each family. Some of the kids that die are the youngest in the family, all of the other ones are old enough to get up out of their seats and out of the car if they are forgotten. And for some of those parents won’t have another baby because of the grief and worry about it happening again. For those parents who have one kid die and have another one young enough to be in a car seat in the back, I’m guessing that they hugely ramp up precautions so that they have zero chance to forget the baby. Like having the radio and their cell phone off, a teddy bear that sits in the car seat that is put on the dashboard when the baby is in the car seat, multiple mirrors to make it easy for the driver to see if the car seat is empty or not, and so on, so even if one reminder doesn’t work one of the others will.
And maybe you’ll think that every parent should be hyper-vigilant like that, so that no parent will ever leave their baby in their car. Ideally that would be the case, but parents have only so much energy. If they stressed out that much about the kid in the car, they might be too tired to adequately monitor the kid when playing outside or somewhere else potentially dangerous.
Even so, rarer events happen to the same or related people all the time. If it were truly random, we’d see this.
Which highlights my point. You shouldn’t need to lose a child to take basic precautions if you are at greater risk of doing something stupid like forgetting a kid in a car. If you are so sleep deprived, overworked, generally forgetful, or habituated to a routine, you should take those extra steps without having a need to kill your kid first. If someone can do basic things to make their chance of doing this ZERO as you stated, they should be doing at least some of those things already. Failure to do things like that, then leaving your kid in a car seat you just just recently strapped them into, is negligence just as it would be if you failed to use a car seat, put on a seat belt, or feed them properly.
The larger point is you cannot argue this is some unavoidable tragedy for which no one is culpable, then admit that greater vigilance and basic steps will reduce the chances of this happening to zero.
Then don’t become a parent. I am a parent of two. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s not the hardest thing on the world (we have 7 billion people or so), and it’s certainly not impossible to avoid doing things that actively kill your kids through clear negligence. Further, I do not consider checklists, mirrors, or reminders “hyper-vigilance”. It’s basic foresight. The same foresight I employed when I put locks on cabinets where chemicals are stored, gates on staircases, covers on electrical sockets, etc. I do that because I know I am imperfect.
Choosing to be a parent is not an excuse to avoid culpability for your actions. No one would accept a surgeon’s error with a weak excuse about how surgeons only have “so much energy”. Are you okay with a pilot, doctor, or anyone else you trust using that excuse for a fatal error they make? Of course not.
Of course not, but I also don’t expect a pilot or doctor to work 24/7.
My thought was that if the two of them weren’t so busy getting high, it’s likely that at some point at least one of them would have wondered to themselves “hey, where the heck is our daughter?”, and their child’s death could possibly have been avoided.
Parents don’t work 24/7. No one does.
And that is a completely unfounded assumption based on a typical ignorance of how weed affects people, and stereotypes of people who smoke it. Again, the error was forgetting in the first place. That happened before he got high. There was no evidence he was rushed or harried by a desire to get high, or any evidence the weed impaired his ability to remember. I am not advocating anyone get high on a regular basis. Doubly so when you have kids and other responsibilities. But let’s not pretend it turns you into some dope fiend who cannot remember basic things.
You could also say if other parents weren’t so busy working or running errands they they could have possibly remembered their child in the car.
I sort of agree with Brickbacon here (I realize I am flip-flopping 
) Why should the after-the-fact reason for forgetting your child be relevant? The crime here is not possession of marijuana, it is child neglect.
From time to time on this message board, we are told about how capital punishment is a failure because it doesn’t deter murderers.
So why doesn’t the same argument apply to jailing parents who accidentally leave kids in a hot car, all the more so given that 1) it is unintentional, 2) the jailing doesn’t deter faulty memory, and 3) such parents are probably more rational, well-behaved citizens than murderers who perhaps were already not considering the consequences of their murders to begin with?