Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009) • Hacker News Board

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#131

Post by m_mueller » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 1:44 AM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #114

nervousvarun wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're thinking of this from a purely "statistical scope of the problem" perspective and underestimating the value of "emotional commitment of a parent for their children". If there was an app (would require hardware...some sortof linkup with the child seat) I'd imagine if it was marketed right and there were studies supporting it's effectiveness you could charge an awful lot for it and virtually every parent…

> Car seats are incredibly expensive Not in the US. All carseats undergo strict testing under stringent regulations. While there are some real fancy seats out there, base level models ($50-100) range are safe. More expensive seats have easier adjustments, easy to clean fabric, front/rear-facing modes, and other bells and whistles for parents. For any first time parents in the US, I recommend picking up the latest cop…

For anyone worried about SIDS I'd suggest looking into [1][2]. The counterarguments summed up in [3] seem rather weak to me. If the claim is true that in 10 years no parent following Sprott's method have had a case of SIDS (which no-one seemed to follow up on, even though the study seems quite solid to me), then the counter would have to explain why one should wait instead of just adopting that method. It seems a similar story to Beri-Beri in the Japanese Navy pre-WW2 - one doctor just went and found a cure in the field and everyone else just ignored it because his methods were not proven in a clinical study and because the cure required a change of traditional warrior behaviour.

[1] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13590840400016836

[2] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13590840400017875

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC500741/pdf/jcli...

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#132

Post by mcguire » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 1:45 AM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #102

nervousvarun wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're thinking of this from a purely "statistical scope of the problem" perspective and underestimating the value of "emotional commitment of a parent for their children". If there was an app (would require hardware...some sortof linkup with the child seat) I'd imagine if it was marketed right and there were studies supporting it's effectiveness you could charge an awful lot for it and virtually every parent…

I don't know the American market, but from a Western European perspective that sounds hard to market right. Everyone thinks of mistakes as something other people make (as opposed to accidents, the selling point of good car seats). Nobody is going to think "hopefully I don't forget my child in the car", or at least won't buy anything that gives away that thought.

From the article:

"In 2000, Chris Edwards, Terry Mack and Edward Modlin began to work on just such a product after one of their colleagues, Kevin Shelton, accidentally left his 9-month-old son to die in the parking lot of NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. The inventors patented a device with weight sensors and a keychain alarm. Based on aerospace technology, it was easy to use; it was relatively cheap, and it worked.

"Janette Fennell had high hopes for this product: The dramatic narrative behind it, she felt, and the fact that it came from NASA, created a likelihood of widespread publicity and public acceptance.

"That was five years ago. The device still isn't on the shelves. The inventors could not find a commercial partner willing to manufacture it. One big problem was liability. If you made it, you could face enormous lawsuits if it malfunctioned and a child died. But another big problem was psychological: Marketing studies suggested it wouldn't sell well.

"The problem is this simple: People think this could never happen to them."

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#133

Post by Sleeep » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 1:52 AM UTC

evanpw wrote: post #119

mysterypie wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, at least in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

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

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#134

Post by mcguire » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:03 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #106

rayiner wrote: post #31

This is a great way to analyze the purposes of the criminal justice system. Typically, there are three: punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Prosecuting someone who forgot their kid in the car can't have deterrent effect--to the extent the event was avoidable, the possibility of prosecution couldn't possibly match the deterrent effect created by the risk of harm to the child. Likewise, there is no rehabilitati…

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. People are also really bad about evaluating potential consequences. A person mig…

"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...

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#135

Post by mcguire » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:10 AM UTC

0xbear wrote: post #116

mcappleton wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From the article:

""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.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#136

Post by lph » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:15 AM UTC

Reading this article was heartbreaking. Becoming a parent changes you, or at least it changed me. I can no longer imagine harm to a child---as conjured in a written article, on a television show, or in a discussion---in an abstract way as I once could. It is now intensely emotional, as if it were happening to my own child in front of my eyes.

This being HackerNews, I'm sure we're all thinking about fancy technological solutions to this problem. But there's a low-tech solution. I'm going to go out into my car right now and train myself to always visually scan the back seats before I leave the vehicle. If you do something enough, it becomes ingrained. I don't think about putting on my seat belt anymore; it just magically happens.

The memory expert interviewed in the article explains that this problem happens when the "low level" basal ganglia has the brain on autopilot, compensating for higher-level functionality that's compromised by stress, emotion, and distraction.

So teach the basal ganglia how to look in the back seat before stepping out of the car. Every time.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#137

Post by mcguire » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:17 AM UTC

wolfgang42 wrote: post #124

function_seven wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bad habit of forgetting things at home when I leave in the morning. I developed a habit: “Wallet, keys, badge, smokes, phone” I pat the pocket each item should be in as I say it out loud. Unfortunately, I now do this on auto-pilot. I pat the pocket, say the word, leave the house... and realize I don’t have my badge on me when I arrive at work. I’m thinking about installing a card reader that locks me in the…

I developed the habit of feeling each item instead of just patting the pocket. That way, if the item is missing you won't be able to complete the action. On the other hand, I've found that I now have the problem that if there's an item that's supposed to be missing (for example if I've lent my keys to someone) I have a constant low-grade panic where I keep checking my pockets, realizing there's something missing, rem…

That's how I do the same thing, and I have the same problem.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#138

Post by jdmichal » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:27 AM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #129

tarboreus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

75 F is not safe. Neither is 65 F. I'm not saying you did something wrong, but what your neighbor did was certainly right

> 75 F is not safe. Neither is 65 F. OK, I'll bite. What are you talking about?

Cars are ovens. The article cites a car reaching 110°F on a day in the 60's:

> The high temperature that day was only in the 60s, but the biometrics and thermodynamics of babies and cars combine mercilessly: Young children have lousy thermostats, and heat builds quickly in a closed vehicle in the sun. The temperature in Balfour's car that day topped 110 degrees.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#139

Post by texthompson » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:33 AM UTC

lph wrote: post #136

Reading this article was heartbreaking. Becoming a parent changes you, or at least it changed me. I can no longer imagine harm to a child---as conjured in a written article, on a television show, or in a discussion---in an abstract way as I once could. It is now intensely emotional, as if it were happening to my own child in front of my eyes. This being HackerNews, I'm sure we're all thinking about fancy technologica…

I think of myself as a very absent-minded person. I also can't imagine being in my car without knowing my daughter is in my car. After reading this, I'll probably check the back seat for her even when I'm very confident she's not there.

I don't mean to be critical. I've had a lot of advantages in life, and reading about this breaks my heart. I wish I could understand more about how I could help. None of these parents or kids deserve this situation, even if the parents could have done better.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#140

Post by mcguire » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:36 AM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #30

jostmey wrote: post #3

s

I generally agree with the idea of not criminalizing an honest mistake. I change my tune when it comes to mistakes that show a lack of fitness for the general task/required skills. In some cases I think a civil action like a fine or some type of legal mark that can identify serial 'mistake' makers. If you 'forget' to wear your motorcycle helmet 7 times maybe you just don't get to operate a motorcycle anymore. Or if y…

"I cannot imagine a world where I forget that they're there..."

What specific steps do you take to avoid it? What exactly is the reasonable standard of care in these cases? (Not causing a death is not a standard of care, it's an outcome.)