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.
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.
""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.
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.
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.
