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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is a great way to analyze the purposes of the criminal justice system. Typically, there are three: punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Prosecuting someone who forgot their kid in the car can't have deterrent effect--to the extent the event was avoidable, the possibility of prosecution couldn't possibly match the deterrent effect created by the risk of harm to the child. Likewise, there is no rehabilitative purpose. You think someone who did that is likely to do it again? The only possible purpose is punishment, which doesn't seem valid here either. In my view, the purpose of punishment is to create and reinforce social norms. It makes people not do something not because they fear the punishment, but because they feel shame for violating the norm. Do we need to create such a norm for not endangering your kid?

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I disagree about deterrence. There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that.

People are also really bad about evaluating potential consequences. A person might not be able to imagine themselves killing their own child, so they might ignore the possibility since they think it can't happen to them. They might be able to imagine getting arrested and put in prison, though, and thus making it a crime could make them think twice.

This seems to me like an obvious case of criminal negligence, which merits punishment for all the same reasons that any such negligence would.

I would also say that it should be criminal merely to leave a child in a car like this, even if the child survives. That would go a long way to deterring people who think they're somehow immune. If the child does die, you should still prosecute the act of leaving them, even if you aren't necessarily prosecuting the death. It would be crazy if the punishment were lower if the crime resulted in death.

> There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children.

This raises a question I've wondered about. Can a parent who doesn't want their child "give up" the child to the state without any strings attached? I.e., without doing something bad that would cause the state to take away the child and without being on the hook to the state for future child care.

Before you tell me that enormous crowds are waiting to adopt cute healthy babies, imagine for example a dangerous delinquent adolescent with a serious genetic disorder. Can you voluntarily ask the government to take such an unwanted child with no further contact and no financial obligation?

You would think that this situation comes up frequently, and that there should be a process: Fill in form 54F, signed and notarized by both parents. But it's surprisingly difficult to google a clear-cut answer for any country or jurisdiction.

Yes, at least in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

That's for babies, under 30 days old, which the parents could have readily put up for adoption even without this law. Moreover, the government treats it as a criminal act (abandonment) in some states.

Like I said above, it surprisingly difficult to get a straightforward answer to this.

No, Safe Haven laws are only for newborns.

Nebraska had an accidental experiment by omitting an age limit on their Safe Haven law. Parents drove thousands of miles to abandon their older children until the loophole was closed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/us/03omaha.html

Good article. The most relevant quote: "Mr. Landry, the state director of children and family services, said parents and guardians were mistaken if they thought they could walk away from their responsibilities. The courts might even order them to pay child support." Furthermore, Nebraska has since changed the law, as you already noted; they permit only babies up to 30 days old.

> The courts might order them to pay child support.

Now that's intriguing; it almost sounds like the state is willing to take possession of children in exchange for a monthly fee.

> I disagree about deterrence. There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that.

IMO, if there's any sign of general neglect, then it should certainly be punished harshly. I'm not quite comfortable with doing the same to a loving parent who has one brain fart with terrible consequences. Of course, drawing a clear distinction after the fact can be very difficult, but that's true of many serious crimes.

> I would also say that it should be criminal merely to leave a child in a car like this, even if the child survives.

I tentatively agree with this. Care needs to be taken to ensure you don't hurt the child(ren) even more by taking away an otherwise-excellent parent, but it is dangerous neglect, even if it only happens once and no one is hurt.

"There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that."

I believe we're going to need a citation on that. What exactly does "a lot" mean? 1% of the population of parents? 0.01%? (There are 810 such deaths in the last 20-odd years in the kidsandcars.org database[1]. (Early P.S.: Check out the "frontover" row for a trend.))

"Criminal Negligence" is something like, "The failure to use reasonable care to avoid consequences that threaten or harm the safety of the public and that are the foreseeable outcome of acting in a particular manner."[2] Where exactly is the failure to use reasonable care in these cases that doesn't apply to essentially every parent?

[1] http://www.kidsandcars.org/media/statistics/

[2] http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Criminal+Negli...

Based on the definition you provided, it seems fairly obvious to me based on how I interpret that definition. "acting in a particular manner" = leaving the child in the car, that is the act. "foreseeable outcome" = death. "reasonable care to avoid consequences" = anything that the parent could easily do which would prevent the foreseeable outcome. There are a few things parents can do, and could even combine them. And let's be honest, all are very, very simple. A quick look where you actually lean back and physically see inside the car seat to verify it's empty is enough. That literally takes 2 seconds and about as minimal of an effort as I can think of and it's 100% accurate in prevention, so long as you work it into your routine when exiting a vehicle. For example, I have a system of making sure I never forget any important item that I regularly carry with me anywhere (key, wallet, phone, etc.) The details aren't important and could be considered specific to me, maybe. But it works 100% of the time and I never forget to mentally check for it. I also have never forgotten/lost any of the items I check for in about 12-15 years (since I started using it). And make no mistake - I'm not doing this because I'm naturally organized. I do because I an not. I'm scatterbrained and forget things all the time. My system is designed to ensure that I don't forget anything critically important like, oh I dunno, my kid in a car in the blazing heat.

Same for the front/backovers. I've had my kid do both of these. The rule on my side is simple. The car doesn't move if I don't have eyes on my child. If I can't visually confirm my kid's location, I assume they are in one of these spots and the car stays in park and then I mildly panic until I can locate them again. Only then does the car move. How is any of this hard for people to make into a habit?

This is entirely avoidable in every single case, but it requires creating unbreakable habits for yourself.

Clone your self by 300 million and tell me you won't forget the keys over a period of 20 years one time.

I'm not sure all 300 million us adults subscribe to your newsletter.

'forget things all the time' - so you admit there is a chance 100 percent can drop to 99.9999?

A friend of a friend had their child eat a battery that was left lying around in the house, I'm pretty sure there are a million other potential killer forgetful actions that parents face.

Eating a battery is not a reasonably foreseeable event that would occur with a high probability. It's something that can happen, sure. But doesn't happen that often even when they are left around. So I don't think anyone should be charged in that case. You can't protect against everything. But it's really easy to protect against leaving your kid in the car. And since that carries an extremely high probability of serious injury or death, people should be mindful about it and try to do whatever they need to in order for it to never happen. It boils down to risk and statistics. There are 100 ways your kid can kill themselves in your house every day. They could stick something metallic into an outlet and electrocute themselves or knock into something and a heavy object falls on them. You can't know that any of those things will happen at the moment they do, but you do know what is likely to happen if you forget your child in the car on a hot day. The cause and effect are proximate and immediate. That's why there should be culpability. It should be no different than how we prosecute the most serious errors on the road such as drunk driving that leads to a serious, possibly fatal accident or whether it's just someone who wasn't paying attention or was very tired and accidentally hit someone. We generally, but not always, charge those individuals. The prosecutors look at the evidence and if a driver made a serious/negligent mistake, they charge them. If the circumstances were one of happenstance and not a clear fault, then charges are usually not levied. Same logic should apply here.

Yeah I said I forget things all the time but the things I forget are NOT part of the system I have in place. That's the point. The habits I have are to make sure I don't forget the things I really care about or absolutely need. So no, it will not be 99.9999% for those items - it will be 100%. In fact, my habits have caught me forgetting the things on the list literally hundreds of times over the past decade. It works and it always catches it.

> it's 100% accurate in prevention, so long as you work it into your routine when exiting a vehicle

Your fallacy, because you are apparently a person who is good at teaching themselves new routines based on safety statistics, is assuming that is a general skill that everyone has and that everyone could be expected to have.

If you're actually interested in preventing child deaths, and not just moralizing, the proper thing to do is treat this as a public health issue, and understand that not every parent has the same emotional and cognitive facilities as you do.

I don't have a number backed by some statistics, but there is this news in Sydney _today_ that a father pointed a gun at 4yo daughter and pulling the trigger. It was caught on camera.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-31/father-charged-after-p...

Such coincidence is a good reminder that the % is not as low as some people like to argue/believe.

Approximately 100,000 American children suffer physical abuse at the hands of a parent each year:

http://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/media-ki...

If the proportion of abuse victims which are subject to physical parental abuse is approximately the same, then about 13,000 of those victims are under one year old.

If you're going for an argument that really bad parents are too rare to take into account, it seems to me that argument works both ways: the number of good parents who would be victimized by prosecuting hot car deaths would be really small. At an average of ~40 such deaths per year, at most 80 good parents would be improperly prosecuted per year.

This page gives examples of criminal negligence which to me seem to be pretty similar to leaving a child in a car like this:

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-negligence.ht...

In particular, I don't see a fundamental difference between a nurse forgetting to feed a patient and a parent forgetting to take their child out of the car.

The fact that there are only ~40 such deaths per year in the US suggests to me that this is not, in fact, something that would apply to essentially every parent.

> Approximately 100,000 American children suffer physical abuse

> If you're going for an argument that really bad parents are too rare to take into account

You're moving the goalposts. The assertion wasn't that there are lots of bad parents out there, the assertion was that there are parents out there who are more afraid of jail than of killing their child.

Fair enough. With nearly 2,000 American children a year dying of child abuse, I'm confident that it qualifies as "a lot."

I find the callousness in this post extremely distressing.

You don't understand what having a child under the age of six months is like. You are incredibly sleep deprived, making errors at work and are a danger on the road. My wife and I piled up a barricade of boxes to the door of our balcony because we were terrified that one of us would hallucinate at 4am and drop our newborn off the fourth floor.

So when I read about a mother who thought she had dropped her infant off at daycare with her four-year-old, and instead found her dead in the backseat when she got off work that night, my first thought was, "That could have been me." When I read about a parent who backed her car over her infant, I immediately remembered the morning I backed over my lunch because I had been up all night with a screaming newborn and my morning routine got off a beat when my neighbor interrupted it to ask a question.

The real tragedy here is that we could probably greatly reduce these incidents by giving new parents extended maternity leave or providing them some other form of social support. Unfortunately, the same mindset in this country that considers these tragedies "criminal" are also the same people who think giving a new mother time off is some kind of free ride.

If you read stories about these tragedies and your gut reaction is "shitty parents" who "want to kill their children," then your ethical mindset is completely alien to me. I don't know how to teach you the importance of compassion and sympathy for your fellow human beings.

I'm a father and I know exactly what it's like, but good job assuming.

I think you misunderstood the point I'm making. I'm not saying every single parent who leaves a child in a car is a bad parent. I'm saying that some are, and making it a crime will deter them. I'm also saying that it can deter even good parents.

The fact that you are a parent makes your position even more incomprehensible. If you truly know "exactly what it's like" then you would have sympathy for the parents who experience these tragedies and would be offering preventative solutions instead of demonizing them and demanding punitive measures.

The entire point of my comment is that I believe treating it as a crime will prevent it from happening to some extent. You may disagree, but I'm not offering punitive measures instead of preventive solutions. I'm offering punitive measures as preventive solutions.

I think you're falling victim to the common fallacy where I advocate for A, you believe that A has consequence X, therefore you believe I'm advocating for X. But I believe A has consequence Y, and so I'm not in any way advocating for X.

I have great sympathy for parents who fall victim to this. But I'm more concerned with reducing the incidence of it. If treating it as a crime helps, which I believe it would, then it's well worth the tradeoff to me.

Coming at it from a personal perspective, if it ever happened to me, I can only imagine that I would be so distraught that I wouldn't care what the law did to me.

Intentionally leaving your child in the car, knowingly or wrecklessly putting them at risk of harm, is already criminal. People have gotten life sentences for it, even when their defense was absent mindedness. See, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/us/justin-ross-harris-trial-ve...

But any criminal law that punished unintentionally leaving your child in the car would be unconstitutional in the U.S., and likely in most other developed nations. There's a mens rea component to criminal liability that requires a degree intention of the act plus knowledge of the possible consequences. That component is especially strong for felony offenses or anything that comes with serious punishment, which is presumably what we're talking about. (I doubt a misdemeanor fine is going deter a brazen sociopath, given the existing criminal liability risks.)

So I just don't see the point in trying to crack down. It would be superfluous for many reasons. That kind of logic is how the U.S. has accumulated so many criminal laws that prosecutors can bully people without fear of any sort of reprisal. Throw enough charges at someone and one of them is bound to stick, just because the justice system (any justice system) is imperfect and innocent people are always at risk of a false positive verdict.

I don't understand the last part of your comment. Good parents almost never (note: "almost"!) leave their children alone in a car. Cracking down on it would not noticeably increase the ability of the police to selectively prosecute people.

Looking at what gets treated as criminal negligence, one site mentioned that a nurse failing to feed a patient who can't feed themselves, and who subsequently starves to death, would be criminal negligence. You seem to indicate that this couldn't be criminal since it lacks intent. Is that example incorrect?

How do you tell the difference between someone who forgot their child in a car from someone who "forgot" their child in the car? Should we really be sending the message "you can always get away with killing your kid as long as you use this method. It's a get out of jail free card."

From my experience growing up parental child abuse is fairly common but very underreported so the case of malice can't exactly be discounted.

It's a difficult issue... Even if malice isn't intended there is certainly negligence.

That's true of many crimes, though. Leaving a pan on a hot stove could be insurance fraud, murder, or honest absentmindedness. It's already the court's job to look at the facts and make the best judgment they can.

>Likewise, there is no rehabilitative purpose.

I think thats potentially the most important purpose here. The definition being the reintroduction to society, a parent who unintentionally killed their child by locking them in a car needs to go through some sort of treatment, that much is evidenced by the thoughts of suicide the parent developed afterward.

I know HN likes trials and not pleas, but instead of wasting tax payer money on this trial, only for the parent to be found not guilty, they might have cut a plea deal to drop the case upon completion of court ordered therapy and if their are surviving sibilings some parenting classes.

HN likes trials and not pleas?

Do a search for "plea deal" here on HN, read a few of the threads and see for yourself if you find a prevailing and common theme: anti-plea deals and pro-trial

I think you're confusing punishment with deterrence. Punishment has a vengeful nature, and comes from a more primitive time when victims got their retribution by seeing offenders suffer. Of course it's related to deterrence, but the way you talk about it deterrence is the purpose of punishment, which I don't think is correct. Punishment (and specifically, fulfilling or abating the desire for revenge of the wronged) is an end in itself.

If you replace the victim with a dog instead of his own child, I'd say, "Yes he'd probably do it again.".

That leads to an odd situation where the action that leads to a child's death would warrant a lesser sentence than the same act leading to a dog's death.

I'm not sure someone who suffers through a dead dog wouldn't learn anything from it. It still seems like a traumatic event, even if the dog isn't a person.

Leaving a dog in a car is now the same offense as leaving a child in a car in Australia.

The latter seems more cruel. I mean, how is the child supposed to get back?

The difference is the perceived likelihood of malice or malicious indifference. It is fathomable that people let a dog die in the car because they don't care that much, or because they hate the dog.

People care about their children, and if someone did kill a child like this, with malice, they'd be vilified. Heck, they might even get lynched.

not if you consider the loss to be time served.

That happened to someone in my family. You can be sure they'll never do it again.

It also sounds like a situation where you'd probably prefer a professional judge over a jury of your peers.

It could plausibly have a deterrence effect if other parents have their memories jogged by seeing the coverage of the court cases.

Aside from one localish case that was maybe-murder (and that also dropped off the news way before it got as far as a court case, so I don't know how that actually turned out) the news is usually of the occurrence, not the charges—the potential of which may be mentioned in the story, but are never the focus.

I can reliably inform you that this coverage of the occurrences, but not the charges/convictions, is quite enough to give parents yet another thing to stress the hell out about against all statistical reason.

You didn't offer anything concrete on why it doesn't have deterrent effect. Your entire argument seems to be based on the assumption that _all_ parents care about their children, sadly we all know this is not true.

I'd imagine the purpose here would fall under general deterrence. By bringing down a harsh sentence here, you'd hope that future parents would take extra care to prevent such things from happening in the future. There is doubt just how effective general deterrence is in reducing criminal behaviour (see Death Penalty), but I'll admit it does call into question the utility of destroying a man's life that in all likelihood has already been irreparably altered. One thing is for certain, this guy was criminally negligent to highest degree (causing death), and it's unlikely a functioning criminal justice system is going to let someone walk away from that.

That's a pragmatic theory, but in a reality there's also a little of irrational need for eye-for-an-eye revenge in an act of the punishment of a wrongdoer, people need that to feel that the justice was really met. It's an atavistic urge, lynch mob instinct to hate those who you see as a danger to your group. And yes it's not very rational or ethical, certainly not very civilized, and we can pretend we don't feel that way, but it's a part of a human nature. People who follow the rules expect to see those who break them punished as a proof that the system works; it makes them feel safe and content (and also reinforces social norms, as you've said).

You don't just need to consider whether they would do it again. You also need to consider whether, if he gets off scot free, some unhappy depressed parent will do it on purpose and then claim she "forgot". So in this regard a punishment would both serve as a deterrent and reinforce societal norms.

Doesn't that mean we should do away with involuntary manslaughter? After all, the perpetrator of a murder may claim it was an accident. Of course, you can try to prove that it was intentional - but the same applies here.

Manslaughter is by definition involuntary, look it up in the dictionary. Doesn't mean you won't go to jail for it, unless the jury lets you go.

18 U.S.C. § 1112: Manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice. It is of two kinds:

(1) Voluntary

(2) Involuntary

My understanding is that (1) is you deliberately did something that killed someone but your intent was not to harm them, say you’re working on a car you mean to scare them by faking dropping the engine on them, but actually do drop the engine, vs (2) you’re working with your friend on a car and drop the engine without knowing that they’re under it.

For (2) i believe that other things feed in to it - did you take sufficient caution, did you have reason to know there was someone there, were you following best practice, etc.

If you did literally nothing wrong (eg a completely freak accident) I don’t believe manslaughter would apply

IANAL though so don’t go dropping engines on people and blame me :)

I believe it's better that some guilty go free if it means that the innocent are not wrongly punished. Wrongly punishing the innocent is terrible and causes so many psychological problems. That's why we have innocent until proven guilty

The key phrase here is "some", and not "all". I mean why is it even an argument that killing your own kid through negligence should be a crime? The perp may or may not be convicted, but they _must_ go through a trial for something like that, and the jury of their peers must decide. Anything else would cause a spike in "negligence". Because let's face it, there are a lot of people out there who have no business having kids in the first place.

If we could openly admit that we send innocent people to jail, it would be much easier to argue for better prison services for inmates. Afterall, we are assuming some portion of it is innocent.

From the article:

""This is a case of pure evil negligence of the worse kind . . . He deserves the death sentence."

""I wonder if this was his way of telling his wife that he didn't really want a kid."

""He was too busy chasing after real estate commissions. This shows how morally corrupt people in real estate-related professions are."

"These were readers' online comments to The Washington Post news article of July 10, 2008, reporting the circumstances of the death of Miles Harrison's son. These comments were typical of many others, and they are typical of what happens again and again, year after year in community after community, when these cases arise. A substantial proportion of the public reacts not merely with anger, but with frothing vitriol.

"Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.

"Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

"In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."

"After Lyn Balfour's acquittal, this comment appeared on the Charlottesville News Web site:

""If she had too many things on her mind then she should have kept her legs closed and not had any kids. They should lock her in a car during a hot day and see what happens."

Terrible things do in fact happen at random, the universe is implacable and heartless, and it's not entirely possible to be sufficiently vigilant and responsible to avoid all catastrophes.

It's a tough situation. The parents are already wracked with grief over their mistake. Anybody can forget. For something truly accidental it's not right to punish harshly. Obviously in the case of intentional neglect or intended murder punishment is appropriate.

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