The correct answer is this would never happen. This, like babies only wearing diapers and minors who look older than 21, is an urban legend.
I think the difference between the two scenarios is that it’s normal for parents to associate being at a playground with having their kid with them. That’s why these people didn’t forget their kids at the playground. They did not, however, associate driving to work with having their kids in the car because it was out of the norm. Or they were so distracted by other things to not realize that they hadn’t made the normal stop at the daycare center.
I won’t dispute that the child’s safety is the parents’ responsibility. I would just say that it appears that the parents involved did not willfully or negligently shirk that responsibility. As noted, the juries and prosecutors in some of those cases came to the same conclusion.
Eh? It’s a hypothetical situation, a thought experiment, not an urban legend, and it certainly could happen.
I’m not sure what you mean about babies only wearing diapers, but I’ve met plenty of minors who look over 21, and was one of them myself.
I’d like to add that people tend to judge parents more harshly than they would any other group of people. Juries are made up of ordinary people; they’re not predisposed to go easy on negligent parents and they’re just as likely to think ‘it could NEVER happen to ME.’ But they, with all the facts at their disposal, find these parents not guilty.
No, those are all positions that Dio has put forth in the past. Based on that I figured that that’s how he’d respond.
Oh, I get you now.
No they aren’t.
It’s not irrelevant when you argue like this:
Bolding mine. You are arguing about intent here, no?
In order to convict someone of murder, which is the *only *thing that merits life imprisonment under current statutes, you DO have to establish intent (mens rea). I have already linked the statutes that apply. Here it is again.
And in case you decide yet again to not click:
As to criminal negligence for lesser charges of manslaughter (reckless homicide) or criminally negligent homicide, the relevant links have already been provided (thanks Bearflag70 as well. Here you go again.
In case you decide not to click through:
You *could *argue constructive knowledge in these cases, but only insofar as refuting that the parent was ignorant of the danger of leaving the child in the car unattended. But you’d also have to argue that the parent displayed some awareness that they were leaving said child in the car. However, without the mens rea element, that still does not equate with murder.
Seriously? You don’t remember the baby diaper thread or the statutory rape thread?
Or
Gotcha ya!! 
Have you read the link to the WaPo article about the science that may be behind the “child-left-in-a-car” syndrome? It was posted as a link in this thread, but I’m not sure many people read it. I didn’t. But, in the Pit thread by Billfish, an excerpt was posted and opened my eyes. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12599044&postcount=27
Giving examples involving a playground with your kid don’t apply. The babysitter analogy doesn’t work.
It’s all about something as connected as driving a car with the baby in the back seat and part of your brain is driving the car and part is thinking about your schedule and …you get the idea.
Read it if you haven’t.
Okay. One more try. How do you explain the prosecutors who have not pursued a case, or the juries who have acquitted, in instances where the parent has confessed and never contested that he or she left the kid in the car and that act led to the kid’s death? Are they all just ignoring the law you assert exists that demands in such a case that the defendant be found guilty?
Yep. It really is a topic where you need to read more about the psychology and about people’s experiences rather than going on your personal experience. You need to get some perspective - realise that every parent has moments of inattention. We can all think of them.
Only then do you realise that your momentary lapse in judgment, which every single parent has, is the same as the parents in these cars - only theirs lead to the child’s death.
So you yourself are guilty of criminal neglect, then:
You left your baby in the car. Therefore you are guilty of a crime under your black and white world view. I still want to know how you left your kid in the car at all if you check the car seat every time.
I was on the DZ during a very busy day when a friend of mine who was an instructor & jumpmaster took a plane full of students up. The plane landed without dropping anyone, the instructor got out, ran inside and came back buckling his rig on. Got back in the plane and everything went normally from there.
He was very shaken up by that.
Negligently - the actor is unaware of the attendant circumstances and the consequences of his conduct, but a “reasonable person” would have been aware
We could posit that the parent would be fully aware that the day in question is hot… and that leaving the child in the car would cause harm to the child. Of course the parent had no intent… but I concur with DIO intent isn’t always necessary for negligence. Hence Marilyn Engholm… and Kevin Daley and Marlene Heath. When the situation occurs its largely up to the prosecutor to decide whether to go forward with criminal proceedings.
I hadn’t caught that the first time through – brutally painful to read, but illuminating. It has definitely changed my understanding of how this type of thing could happen to almost anyone. The “thinking you’ve dropped the child off and going about your day” mistake seems to be by far the most common listed in the article, and is scarily relatable – which of us hasn’t had a :smack: moment when we realized we forgot to do something in the course of an everyday routine?
So, given this, I would definitely withhold judgment on any given case until I knew the facts. This is not to say I’d assume it wasn’t possible for a parent to be negligent in this type of situation – when a child dies in an adult’s care, negligence has got to be considered a possibility. But I see now a far wider range of mitigating circumstances than I had previously appreciated.
Criminal negligence requires that the defendant willfully placed the child in a circumstance that a reasonable person would have known was dangerous, even if there was no intent for harm to occur. “Willfully” is the operative word. A parent who leaves a kid in the car “just for a minute” while he goes shopping may well be criminally negligent. A parent who is unaware that the child is in danger, no.
What I would posit is that it is actually extraordinarily common for people to operate on autopilot to the point that they can forget things in a car, it’s just mercifully uncommon for what’s forgotten to be a baby. It’s more often a purse or briefcase, or lunch, or something you don’t normally have, like the package someone gave you midday that you weren’t expecting, that you leave in the car when you get home, or the library book that you mean to drop in the return box on the way into work, but don’t, because you get into your routine.
And it’s the matter of going onto autopilot with our routines that makes any non-automatic solution to the left-behind-baby matter completely useless. There has to be something that is triggered solely by the fact of the baby being in the carseat when the parent is out of the car. My idea would be that on all new cars, there would be a tie-in between the latch for the carseat and the door locks. If the carseat is still latched, the doors would not lock and the keyfob would make a warning sound.
Any parent who leaves the kid in the car knows the kid is in danger.
It is not a legal excuse to say you “forgot.”