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"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."

> 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 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.

> 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.

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?