They put the kid in the car. They knew the kid was there. “I forgot” is a grade school excuse. It doesn’t fly for grown ups and it’s not an excuse for killing a child.
The argument now is that the parent willfully failed to take sufficient measures to protect against forgetting the child is in the car.
What measures should a parent take?
They should have a plan in place to double-check the car upon exit.
What if they forget about the plan to double-check?
They should take reasonable precautions in advance to ensure they don’t forget to double-check.
Like what?
They should plan to remember to remember to double-check to remember the kid.
I see.
But it does fly in terms of criminal law. It doesn’t fly in civil law.
What measures they take are up to them. Whatever works. The article suggests putting wallets and purses in the back seat. Sounds good to me. Do you think it’s unreasonable to take any measures at all?
Thanks, ToborAton. I was trying to formulate in my mind a concise way of pointing out that there is more than one type of “forgetting,” and this expresses it admirably.
The fact that these two very different different cognitive phenomena are both called “forgetting” is effectively making any progress impossible in this debate.
I don’t see a court holding someone criminally liable for failing to implement one of the memory gimmicks in the article.
Forgetting = lack of present knowledge
Thus, forgetting is a defense to any law requiring knowledge or intent.
In terms of the criminal negligence, that requires willfully placing someone in harm’s way.
For that to work, you have three options I can see:
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Willfully leaving the kid in the car. This requires present knowledge of the presence of the kid in the car. Forgetting is a defense to knowledge.
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Willfully forgetting the kid is in the car. You can’t willfully forget something, so that’s out.
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Willfully putting the kid in the car and using the car without an adequate exit strategy. How are you ever going to prove that, upon entering the car, the parent didn’t have a plan to double-check the car upon exit, but simply forgot to implement that upon exit? There’s nothing willful about forgetting.
I think we’re done here. Kudos for finding an infraction.
Actually, no, what it proves is your inability to read the fucking thread. Dio said that leaving the baby in the car is automatically a crime, and that mental state does not enter into it. “Knowingly” and “intentionally” are both mental states, making Dio wrong regardless of how you interpret the statute.
Who is watching the manure pit while you’re posting here?
Well, Indiana for one. See the previously cited Neglect of a Dependent statute. I have supervised offenders on probation for that very act. While it is obviously only going to be charged when something bad happens, it is the act of leaving the firearm where the child can get it that is charged as a crime.
Thanks for playing though. Some day, if you work really hard and stay in school, you might actually be able to contribute something worthwhile to one of these threads.
Was this directed at me? I’m on your side here; it seems to me that Diogenes has been flitting back and forth between the two types of “forgetting” (distinguished above), depending on which one will get him out of whatever hole he’s currently dug himself into.
Wouldn’t it be intolerably irresponsible for someone to not take such precautions, if in fact (it turned out) they were otherwise capable of such negligence?
No, not at you at all.
I don’t think the law should require the ordinary reasonable person to act as though they are expected to go to great lengths to plan for potentially forgetting a kid in the car every time they get into it.
If someone knows they have memory problems and the risk of forgetting is substantially higher than the ordinary reasonable person, then maybe that forgetful person should be held to the forgetful person standard, requiring greater diligence.
I’m actually not really happy with this part of my post but I haven’t found a better way to explain it yet so take it with equal parts salt, to taste.
Yes, Tobor, I got no problem talking to myself; well besides the weird tenses.
Should probably let this thread die - or start a new one. But I’ve been thinking about the meme that this “could happen to anyone” because “that’s the way our brains are wired” (my paraphrases).
Perhaps (most likely) our brains tend to break down/develop blind spots when overtaxed. This is consistent with something I have long felt about multi-tasking. Folk are clearly able to do several things at once, but at some point they end up doing none of them as well as if they had concentrated on fewer tasks at one time. But modern society seems to be trending towards finding superficial, shared attention adequate for nearly all actions.
Is it entirely off the ball to suggest that letting oneself get overly committed into simultaneously stressful situations can rise to the level of criminal negligence when it results in harm to another being? I guess my thinking along these lines reflects my belief that the majority of life situations - including jobs, lifestyles, and parenting - involve significant elements of personal choice. If you take more onto your plate than it turn out you can handle, ought not society find you responsible?
And I don’t want to resurrect the old stay-home vs working parent. Undoubtedly some of these parents were stay-homes just trying to do much on a very bad day. But occurrences like this suggest to me that parenting - especially in pre-school years - is WAY too important AND difficult to be treated as yet one more of the countless “chores” involved in hectic modern daily life. And I believe criminal prosecutions - most frequently resulting in minimal penalties, might serve a useful purpose of reminding people of where their priorities ought to lie.
I agree with this. So, how does one navigate in modern society successfully without, to some extent, adapting to societal expectations? Take, for example, a medical resident physician who is expected to work 30-hour shifts with 10 hour breaks in between. Now consider the resident is a single parent attempting to get as much time with his child as possible and accomplish all the necessary tasks of living. If the resident determines that he is unable to safely carry out normal everyday tasks as a result of debilitating shiftwork, what are his options? Ask for shorter shifts and/or less hours, give up his career for a less stressful, demanding one (presumably reducing his ability to provide for his family), or suck it up and do the best he can? This is but one example. Plenty of people work in highly stressful and demanding careers? Should they stop because it’s really asking too much of people to work that hard?
The question is how does one know they can’t handle what’s on their plate until there is a catastrophic failure? Surely, for some there will be distinct and repeated signs that they are in over their head, but not for all. Some of the people highlighted in the article don’t strike me as consistent sufferers of memory failure before the tragedy. They seemed to everyone to be pretty capable, responsible people. Yes, they were harried and preoccupied. Mostly, they seemed to have it under control…until the catastrophic failure.
I don’t think it’s necessary to remind those people where there priorities lie. I don’t think they ever forgot that even while they went through their daily lives as their babies died. In their minds, everything was as it should be wrt to their child.
This is basically what I was thinking. How can you prove, in court, that a person intentionally, willfully, or knowingly became mentally overtaxed? You don’t realize you’re overtaxed until after the fact.
Also, how can you prove a person’s forgetfulness was caused by being mentally overtaxed at any given moment?
First, I think you’re mistaken in your belief that parents that end up in this situation must necessarily be overstressed. Experience tends to show that this is often a result of a minor variation in routine, and I think most of us have experienced this to some degree without ending up with a dead child.
Heck, I’ve “misplaced” my own baby girl this week, although at the other end of the spectrum - we have been home sick all week. She recovered enough to go back to daycare before I have made it back to work - yet (because it’s been my routine) for the first day I kept panicking, having the impression that I’d forgotten her. (Listening to something with headphones, and OH MY GOD I WON’T BE ABLE TO HEAR HER WHEN SHE WAKES UP FROM HER NAP! Oh. No worries about something horrible happening, but the fact remains that I lost track of where she was.
I’m glad to have read about how this can happen, because it helps to make sure there are safeguards against it. By way of an example, our routine is to drop baby off at daycare on the way to work each morning. As it happens, the simplest route to our back-up daycare provider goes directly by the office. During a normal day, driving on this stretch of road means baby is already dropped off. I do not have the hubris to declare that it would be impossible for me to get tripped up by this. I am an attentive father, but I also recognize that the force of habit can be compelling – so we do everything possible to make sure that it is going to work for us rather than against us. (Office keys’ normal place is in the back seat with baby, every day, so even if we somehow ended up forgetting for a moment, there would be no consequences worse than a red forehead.)
As for criminal charges for this type of mishap, I don’t see that they would help much. As a post hoc thing the punitive aspect seems pretty inconsequential next to a dead or injured child, and wouldn’t do anything to change the behaviour of someone who believes that baby is already where she is supposed to be.
There are already good laws in place to deal with the sort of monster who consciously decides to neglect their kid.
The fact that so many people manage to get through the rigors of daily life without killing their kids is going to set the bar for the ordinary reasonable person quite high. You’re going to have to prove this suspect in this case was unreasonably mentally taxed compared to the ordinary reasonable person.
Some states agree with you and have enacted strict liability statutes.
Of course, these are the statutes that Dio had in mind all along.
I know someone who accidentally left a toddler in a warm car for 10 minutes.
He was making a quick trip to the store with a friend who was visiting from out of town. As he was getting in the car (which was borrowed from another friend, adding one more distraction), his wife buckled a two-year-old into the back seat. The kid was silent during the 5-minute drive to the store.
When he returned to the car after 10 minutes of shopping, he was shocked to see his kid in the back seat. He had only been vaguely aware that the kid was accompanying him on the trip.
The kid was soaked in sweat and a little lethargic. If this had been a slightly warmer day or if the shopping list had been longer, it would have been another tragedy like that described in the OP.
So yes, good parents can have disastrous accidents.