From Lenore Skenazy at Free-Range Kids, a Delaware mom put her three-year-old down for a nap, and then went to take one herself. That’s how a good parent does it, exhausted from the daily grind plus caring for a child, the only safe time to sleep is when your kid sleeps. Except this time.
Unbeknownst to her, her daughter then got up and managed to get out of the house. When police found the little girl later, they went looking for the mom and charged her with child endangerment.
Lenore asks why, instead of charging mom, they didn’t just help mom. She sums it up:
When we criminalize the ups and downs of normal life, we start making it seem as if living that normal life (which inevitably involves some mistakes and surprises) is criminal. That’s when we start believing we need to take extraordinary precautions against unlikely events, and hovering over our kids out of fear for them and fear for ourselves — we could be blamed!
Whether we get crazy out of fear of being charged with a crime isn’t clear to me. Few of us think much about it, not truly believing we, fine, upstanding, law-abiding citizens, could ever be charged with a crime because we’re the good guys. No matter what we read about, see or hear, there’s a bone in our head that says only bad people get arrested. Good people have nothing to fear. We have nothing to fear.
It’s not until a bizarre event happens to us or someone who touches us that this becomes real. We enter the incomprehensible world of the legal system, where nothing works the way the platitudes say it should, that the realization that Kafka wasn’t nuts hits home.
But in Lenore’s story, a different issue presents itself. The mother did what pretty much every mother does. Fathers too. She did what good mothers do. And then, something went badly awry, as the toddler got loose and she was blamed. With a slight variance in circumstances, picture the mother at the mall whose 3-year-old wandered away when she wasn’t looking for a second. That’s all it takes, as any parent knows, for a kid to escape. It’s not a stretch to have the child found and the mother arrested for endangerment.
While the numerosity of laws criminalizing conduct is unknown, the nature of conduct being criminalized has become clear. Don’t make a mistake. Don’t leave any possibility that an accident might happen. Are you less than perfect? Then you’ve committed a crime.
Tolerance for human imperfection has reached an all-time low. Before you scream about the government and its henchmen, look in the mirror.
The other day, a commenter felt compelled to express that a father who made the mistake of putting a gun in the drawer of a night table, and whose 3-year-old found it and, somehow, managed to kill himself, was criminally blameworthy. The accidental loss of his son wasn’t enough. Prosecution for his crime was needed as well. This wasn’t some nasty East Texas crank, as the commenter informed me, after my dismissive interest in her views, that she was an experience appellate criminal defense lawyer of some import, at least to her. Yet she felt an accident demanded conviction.
Is this a product of marketing, that interest groups hoping to bring about a perfect world where no child, perhaps no person, is ever harmed by anything, ever? Consider the influence groups such as MADD have had in crafting drunk driving laws that lack rational foundation and vilify a broad swathe of otherwise law-abiding society. That they’ve been incredibly effective is beyond dispute; and the more than sufficiently sober drive who had an alcoholic beverage and ends up in an fatal accident, even one not of their own fault, is deemed as blameworthy as the sociopath who commits a random, intentional murder.
There’s no arguing the relative merit. When someone is harmed, someone must be blamed. When someone could potentially be harmed, someone must be at fault. No longer do we accept the concept of stercus accidit, that in the natural course, bad things sometimes happen. While we can usually explain how it could have been avoided if only a person did something differently, we are no longer concerned with the normalcy of the choice, but with the severity of the outcome.
No normal human being wants to see a child harmed. Heck, we don’t want to see anyone harmed. If only accidents didn’t happen, if we could anticipate every potential problem and, through our diligence and prescience, make it go away. But we are not that excellent a species, not even the best of us. To err is human.
The culpable state of recklessness, where we perceive a risk is so grave that harm can be fairly said to be inevitable, yet make the decision to ignore it, is one thing. For me, even this remains too vague and presumptuous, too subject to the overlay of other people’s sensibilities in many instances, that it fails to provide a sufficiently clear line to distinguish conduct deserving of criminal sanction from that reflecting the imperfection of humanity.
But we’re coming to the point where no mistake is tolerated. Indeed, many would argue we’ve reached, even passed, that point. That we’re all criminals based on the plethora of crimes is beyond cavil; that we better pray every day that nothing goes wrong in our lives lest we not only suffer the tragedy of a loss, but the insult of prosecution that will follow, is the world we’re facing.
We can’t do this to ourselves and others. We’re not good enough to survive such a vision, and we don’t deserve to be held to a standard that no person can achieve except by mere luck. Accidents happen, not because we’re criminals but because we’re human.
H/T Radley Balko
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Gladys Kravitz clones have come out from behind the living room window and taken over the world.
Nailed it.
And there are also what I (inaccurately) think of as “political pressure” prosecutions — cases where nothing technically criminal was done even under the loosest interpretation, but dear lord something terribly unfortunate happened, there’s an emotional public reaction, and prosecutors rush to get on the public’s good side. Happens now and then. But what’s ignored is that it was merely unfortunate, bad luck, or a mistake — nothing more.
Is that worse than prosecuting any other mistake, just because of the reason why it was charged? I think so. Because the prosecutor has a culpable mental state, ambition, as opposed to merely being an idiot.
So let’s take your point a step further: Who’s worse, the prosecutor who is influenced by public pressure, despite the absence of criminality, or the prosecutor who exercises discretion in order to pursue his personal brand of justice?
Only a slight correction, Scott:
“we are no longer concerned with the normalcy of the choice, but with the severity of the outcome.”
By and large, “we are concerned with the severity of the worst possible outcome.”
Of course, had mom secured the house so the child was unable to escape, that, too, would have been endangerment, for one cannot relax fire safety standards.
I haven’t got the slightest idea what mom was supposed to do to avoid the potential of the child’s escape. Was she required to have a keyed deadbolt on all doors and windows, with the key concealed somewhere in a body cavity? Short of that, or chaining the child to a bed, nothing is foolproof.
When someone comes up with the standard that will satisfy all duties, please let me know.
My point was the Lenore would be caught on the child neglect version of Morton’s Fork. As for your query, tt appears to me that the answer of the people who enthusiastically prosecute and convict people like unfortunate Lenore is that she should have borne and reared only perfect children like their own.
Else, one needs a perfectly vigilant and good sentry to watch while she slept. That’ll cut into unemployment among perfectly vigilant and wholesome people.
Yesterday in Martinsville, Indiana a woman and her boyfriend were jailed on charges of neglect because her 11-year-old son shot and killed his 6-year-old brother.
Who benefits from prosecuting these cases?
I actually know someone to whom this happened. They took her little boy away while they conducted an extensive investigation. It was awful.
Well, of course they did. You can’t have a child with his mother before they’re sure she did anything wrong. It would be unnatural.
You have to watch a toddler every minute. But it’s impossible to watch a toddler every minute. Those are the two problems with having toddlers.