Why "Caylees law" is a bad idea

[naaman fletcher]

Jamie Downs is the Coastal Regional Medical Examiner for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and co-editor of a forthcoming book on forensic ethics about Caylee's Law. Downs also formerly served on the board of directors for the National Association of Medical Examiners. Contrary to what you may have learned from watching CSI, Downs says, there's no way for a medical examiner to determine time of death in the sort of narrow window that would be necessary to enforce Caylee's Law. "I understand that people are outraged, and I understand why they'd want a law like this, but I just don't think it's a good idea. I don't see how you would enforce it," Downs says. "You just can't say for certain that a person died an hour and five minutes ago as opposed to 45 minutes ago."


.....

There are myriad other problems with the one-hour requirement. What if a child dies while sleeping? When would you start the clock on the parent's one-hour window to report? From the time the parent discovers the child is dead, or from the time the child actually dies? If it's the former, can you really believe what a parent tells you if he knows a felony charge hinges on his answer? What if a parent or babysitter missed the deadline because she fell asleep at the time the child was playing outside and suffered a fatal accident? You could argue this is evidence of bad parenting or inattentive babysitting, but under those circumstances, do you really want to charge a grieving parent or heartbroken babysitter with a felony?

The portion of the bill that requires a parent to report a missing child within 24 hours is just as fraught with problems. When does that clock start? From the time the child actually gets abducted, gets lost, or is somehow killed, or at the time the parents noticed the child was missing? How do you pinpoint the time that they "noticed"? When teenager Rosie Larsen is abducted and murdered in the new AMC drama The Killing, it takes two days for her parents to notice she's missing. They thought she was spending the night at a friend's house, and she and her friends often rotated sleeping over at one another's homes on the weekends. The Killing is fiction, but this isn't an implausible scenario. Again, are we really so angry about the Casey Anthony verdict that we're prepared to charge grieving parents with a felony because it takes them longer than some arbitrary deadline to notice their child is missing?

The law and the attention it attracts could also cause problems of overcompliance. How many parents will notify the authorities with false reports within an hour or two, out of fear of becoming suspects? How many such calls and wasted police resources on false alarms will it take before police grow jaded and begin taking note of missing child reports, but don't bother investigating them until much later? How many legitimate abductions will then go uninvestigated during the critical first few hours because they were lost in the pile of false reports inspired by Caylee's Law?


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/caylees-law-casey-anthony-_n_893953.html


This is an excellent article that I hope everybody reads, and if you post a comment that makes it clear you didn't bother to read it, then I won't respond to you.

My plea for all of you all worked up about this: Can't we just wait a little? I understand you got emotionally involved in a tabloid TV story and now their is a void in your life as it didn't turn out the way you expected, kind of like when Kevin Costner turned out to be the bad guy in No Way Out, but this is serious business here. The nation has managed to survive so far without this law. Can we wait until the next big tabloid story for you to get caught up in? Maybe Pippa will get pregnant soon or something like that, then we can come back and discuss this issue rationally. OK?

[LiberalFighter]

1. Bad laws are made by bad politicians. PERIOD

And the laws that are already on the book are either abused or not utilized properly by both prosecutors and defense attorneys.

But I don't think it was an abuse or improper utilization of the law that got her off. It was incompetent prosecution. There is nothing to prevent the prosecution from educating the process of determining death.

[Pab Sungenis]

2. ANY law that has to be peddled by tacking a kid's name onto it

is automatically a bad law.

If you think the law will stand on its own merits, then call it what it really is.

By the way, "Megan's Law" would not have saved Megan Kanka, "John's Law" would not have saved John Albano, and most other "___'s Laws" would have done nothing to protect the people they took their names from.

[Hugabear]

3. Prosecutors usually have discretion in cases like this

I agree, I think it's an unnecessary knee-jerk law. But if it were to pass, I don't think you'd see prosecutors vigorously enforcing it unless there were clear-cut evidence that a parent deliberately waited to notify authorities.

[naaman fletcher]

4. I don't trust prosecutors, and I don't see why anyone else should. nt