Jailing parents after tragedy tough call
Posted on 07/11/2002 3:42:06 AM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Jailing parents after tragedy tough call
FW baby's death in hot car illumniates divide: Prosecute or not?
07/11/2002
A child dies alone in a hot, closed car. Is a forgetful parent a criminal, or another victim of a horribly tragic lapse?
On cases like that of the Fort Worth woman whose 9-month-old son died in a closed car Tuesday, the nation's legal community is divided.
Many prosecutors say parents should be held accountable for what they call inexcusable negligence. Let juries decide, they say.
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What is clear, prosecutors say, is that these cases are among the most difficult in determining whether prosecution serves the interest of justice.
"Good prosecutors have to weigh the need to hold them responsible when they have already suffered the most difficult loss, the loss of a child," said James Backstrom, a Minnesota prosecutor and former vice president of the National District Attorneys' Association. "There has to be some level of accountability, but it's a very difficult situation to deal with probably the most difficult."
WFAA-TV Police said a warrant would be issued Thursday for Jessica Estrada Rueda, whose 9-month-old died Tuesday in a hot car. |
In Fort Worth, police said a warrant would be issued Thursday for the arrest of Jessica Estrada Rueda, 27, charging her with criminally negligent homicide in the death of 9-month-old Lorenzo Rueda.
Ms. Rueda, who was questioned at length by police, said she thought she had left the child at day care but later discovered him dead in the car when she went to lunch.
Four area cases last year each handled differently demonstrate the difficulty that prosecutors say they face.
In two of those cases, children died after climbing into parked cars, and no charges were filed. In a third case, Dallas County grand jurors declined to indict a mother charged with reckless injury to a child after leaving her child in a hot car while she worked.
In the fourth case, a Dallas couple who left their toddler son in a closed car was indicted. They are awaiting trial on charges of reckless injury to a child.
Every case different
David Montague, senior staff attorney with the Tarrant County district attorney's office, said he could not comment on Tuesday's death. But in deciding whether to file charges in such a case, he said, several factors have to be considered, and there is no set list that covers every situation.
"You have to look at the relationship. Was it a parent? A baby sitter? Why was the child left in the car?" he said. "Did they know [they were leaving a child in the car] and went to do something else? Or was it just forgetting, which is a little hard to understand."
A child crawling into a car while the parents were distracted could be just a tragic accident, he said. But if there is a history of abuse or neglect, it could be a different matter.
"It's like going down the highway with a kid not buckled up, and he is thrown into the windshield and dies. How was the parent driving? What were they doing? When does it become criminal? It is a different situation," Mr. Montague said, "but it raises the same questions. It's always tough with kids and families."
While acknowledging that many cases "shock the conscience," law professor Jonathan Turley said few should be treated as crimes.
"Sometimes justice requires an element of restraint in expressing its anger over the behavior of a parent," he said. "Criminal prosecution becomes a form of social judgment a way to express social outrage. I think the best prosecutors resist the temptation to use prosecution as a form of social condemnation."
When it's negligence
Collin County First Assistant District Attorney Bill Schultz, however, said it is a rare instance when it makes sense that someone leaves a child in a car. Often, he said, the negligence is so obvious that it overshadows intent.
"The DWI didn't mean to get drunk and kill a family, but in this society we are warned again and again, there are all kinds of things you know you don't do," he said. "I don't think anyone has the right to endanger a child.
"You have a choice; children don't."
Diana Beckham, senior staff council for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, agreed.
"The risk you run if you don't prosecute is you are taking that decision out of the hands of the community. The good in prosecution is you are going to let a jury decide," she said.
Charges in Texas can range from a fine-only misdemeanor of leaving a child in a vehicle, through several levels of felonies with sentences ranging from six months to 99 years.
Victor Vieth, a former prosecutor and now director of the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse in Alexandria, Va., said that though authorities have discretion in whether to file charges in such cases, there are big differences in how the cases are viewed by most Americans.
He points to a pending case in nearby Manassas, Va., where a father has been charged with manslaughter because a toddler died after being left in the family van for seven hours.
"In seven hours, that child should have been fed, had a diaper changed; those factors point to gross negligence," he said, yet the community was outraged when the charges were filed.
"Go to a coffee shop and ask 10 people what should be done when someone leaves a dog in a hot car and it dies. Nine of them will say prosecute. But if it's a child, they'll be evenly split," Mr. Vieth said. "I think there is a good chunk of this country that is more protective of dogs than kids."
Some of that may be because people believe it could happen to them.
"Absolutely," Mr. Vieth said, "people know that their kids have slipped away or that they have lost their temper and know how irritating a child can be. They say, 'What if I left a child for 30 minutes and something happened? What if it happened to me?' "
Common sense
But when a child dies in a hot car, he said, people have to use common sense: "Not many people in the world are going to leave a child in a car for hours."
But it does happen more than 180 times nationwide since 1995, said Anara Guard, information director at Boston University School of Public Health.
Ms. Guard is preparing to publish statistics that she said she began gathering five years ago because no one was keeping track of children dying in closed cars.
About a third of the cases involve toddlers who get in an unlocked car and can't get out, she said.
"People have to treat their cars like swimming pools," she said. "Lock the doors."
In the rest, an adult was responsible.
But that doesn't necessarily make them criminals, said Mr. Turley, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
"The core of criminal law is that acts are done with intent. Negligence has been confined to the civil docket," he said. "Allowing prosecutors to pursue acts of negligence radically increases their power and their ability to abuse it."
He does not disagree in cases where there has been a pattern of abuse or negligence and where the state has been involved, but a memory lapse is another matter.
The problem with the man in Virginia whose child died in the van, Mr. Turley said, was that he had 13 children, his wife was in Ireland, and he had to depend on his teenage daughters as baby sitters.
"To prosecute him will completely destroy that family. It will drain their finances, and possibly put the only breadwinner in jail," he said. "There is no punishment the state can mete out that comes close to loss of a child by a loving parent."
E-mail curthowell@dallasnews.com.
....however, just yesterday, I heard they had reduced her charge to 'involuntary manslaughter' because she didn't intend to kill her children.
Will someone PLEASE explain to me how anyone....anyone....much less a mother....leave little kids in a hot car for 3 hours..........and not call it what it is.....murder!
The woman who had her hair done, knowingly left those kids in the car. That adds up to murder in my book.
However, this woman in the story claims she thought she had dropped the child off at daycare, so it doesn't look like she intended to leave him in the car.
The difference would be the same as in a pool death of a child. If the child was thrown into the pool, yeah, that's criminal. If the child wandered out of the house, and happened to fall into the pool, then I'd call it an accident.
Truth is, most parents at some point in their life have lost track of their kids. (Even Mary and Joseph lost track of Jesus and later found him in the temple.)
My folks left one of us at church one time, and didn't realize it until they got home. I lost my son in a store once when he was small, he was hiding in the clothes rack. (my favorite Mercer Mayer kids book is "Lost in the Mall", where the child, after wandering off comes to the conclusion that his mother is lost in the mall.)
So the cases would have to be discerned on intentional neglect vrs. accidental, IMHO.
Here in Michigan, I have heard not one single person defend the creature who let her two babies die in the car while she had her hair done. Is the Texas woman a professional? There seems to be a double standard that applies when upscale yuppies cook their kids opposed to when it's done by "trailer trash" or "inner city" folks.
This situation sounds completely out of control!
So therefore, why did they reduce her charge.
How can one NOT intend to kill their children when they leave them in a hot car for 3 hours?
This case just makes me livid.
And yes, unintentional mistakes can be made with children.....like you said, we've ALL done that at least once.
But this wasn't unintentional......she even rolled the windows down a bit, from what I've heard.
"Gee, I didn't know the gun was loaded."
How in the world could she THINK that she dropped the child off at daycare? Does that mean that she's having hallucinations strong enough to make her believe that she made the stop at the daycare, exited her car, removed the child from the child-seat, walked into the daycare, handed her child over to the care-giver, walked back to her car, got in her car, started her car, and then continued with her journey?
If that's the case, she needs to be committed to an asylum as a danger to herself and the rest of society.
True, but he was 12, not a baby or toddler...
Truth is...Mom was having an affair and left the baby in the car while she was in the "boyfriend's" house having "fun". I was more broken-hearted than she was over the death of this beautiful little girl...and whenever I hear these stories I get very angry and very sad at the same time.
I cannot imagine any parent being soooo preoccupied that they leave their child to bake in a car for any length of time...yeah a few minutes in the garage when you're getting out groceries I can see...but didn't she see the kid when she got out of the car ? And dropping off a child at day care isn't like going through the drive-thru for some coffee...I mean, you have to get out of the car, grab the kids' stuff, sign them in, etc. Did she really imagine that she'd done all that? Of course...I have a hard time imagining dumping off a child in day care at such a young age too...so maybe I am biased..???
I agree with what you said here.
This, "I thought I took my baby to day care", line is getting a little old in my personal opinion. I do feel sorry for parents who lose their children due to accidental death, but this is getting ridiculous. This happens far too often.
And it seems to be getting quite popular over the last year or two, don't you think?
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