BrianGarst.com

Never legislate under the influence of OUTRAGE! Case in point, the Casey Anthony brouhaha:

When Florida mother Casey Anthony was found not guilty of first-degree murder or manslaughter of her two-year-old daughter Caylee Tuesday, many Americans who had followed the case were outraged, including a woman in Oklahoma who decided to start a petition for a “Caylee’s Law.”

…Oklahoman Michelle Crowder, who is a mother of two daughters, says parents need to report their child’s disappearance immediately, and has started a Change.org petition and Facebook page to ask Congress to create a law to enforce that. “Caylee’s Law” would make it a federal offense and a felony for a parent or guardian to fail to report a child’s disappearance to law enforcement.

“Caylee’s Law” would make it a crime not to report a child missing within 24 hours, or dead within 1. The law is being drafted in several states right now.

“Caylee’s Law” is an absolutely terrible idea. Radley Balko explains:

Crowder concedes that she didn’t consult with a single law enforcement official before coming up with her 24-hour and 1-hour limits. This raises some questions. How did she come up with those cutoffs? Did she consult with any grief counselors to see if there may be innocuous reasons why an innocent person who just witnessed a child’s death might not immediately report it, such as shock, passing out, or some other sort of mental breakdown? Did she consult with a forensic pathologist to see if it’s even possible to pin down the time of death with the sort of precision you’d need to make Caylee’s Law enforceable? Have any of the lawmakers who have proposed or are planning to propose this law actually consulted with anyone with some knowledge of these issues?

…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.”

If medical science can’t pinpoint the time of the child’s death to the minute, how else are authorities going to determine it? They can’t ask the parent. A guilty person isn’t going to give you an honest answer, and even an innocent parent may lie if they fear the truth could land them in prison. It also seems safe to assume that a parent’s first instinct upon witnessing the death of a child isn’t to look up at the clock to take note of an official time of death.

…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”?

…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?

Just because you spotted what you think is a single injustice, does not make it a good idea to go off on an emotional crusade demanding that we “do something” about it. Law’s are blunt instruments, and the consequences are not simply limited to the one case you think you are addressing. You don’t get rid of a gnat by shooting it with a shotgun. Calm down, think a bit, and don’t overreact to every tragedy. Life is full of them, it’s just the way it is.

Caylee's Law