zlacker

The most bonkers thing here to me is giving a man a death sentence because of a believed shaken baby death that he promptly took to the hospital.

>>jncfhn+(OP)
That is what happens if you are innocent. An irony, because you wont make a deal so you can roll the dice on justice.

>>jncfhn+(OP)
You realize a lot of abused kids are taken to the hospital by their abuser?

Kids got a broken arm or a broken nose from being slapped around, abuser can't hide it forever. Eventually kids gotta go to school or cops are going to do a welfare check. Same thing if kid disappears off the radar.

>>jncfhn+(OP)
That is in no way evidence against it being murder. Abusers do that kind of thing all the time.

>>flango+fa
Shaken baby syndrome is very unlikely to be the result of malicious abuse though. It’s almost always a deeply frustrated parent or caregiver who is desperate, trying to assert control over a screaming infant, and does not understand that this could kill them, or at least thinks they will not. It is child abuse, but hardly of the same nature as most people assume with the term.

Death sentence strikes me as an idiotic punishment.

>>vorpal+l6
That’s a very different problem from shaken baby syndrome. See adjacent reply.

>>jncfhn+ec
> It’s almost always a deeply frustrated parent or caregiver who is desperate, trying to assert control over a screaming infant,

That sounds like malicious abuse to me.

> and does not understand that this could kill them, or at least thinks they will not.

It would still be manslaughter at least, if not murder. And if shaking the baby was itself felonious abuse, then an accidental death resulting from that is probably felony murder in states with such statutes.

>>jncfhn+ec
Yes, assuming the perp took the victim promptly to the hospital, I don't see why it should be qualified as murder unless there are antecedents.

I can relate to wanting to silence something very distressing/aggravating by any means necessary but as a Society we've decided that adults should know better and should be held responsible for such mistake/accident. And I tend to agree. So manslaughter it is.

>>mcpack+js
And… what exactly is achieved by this sort of justice system? Congrats, you killed some undereducated, desperate parents who fucked up and lost their child.

>>jncfhn+ic
Your assertion is simply wrong.

SBS is not just a parent trying to shush a baby - it requires a very significant amount of force in a healthy infant. This is not a "oh shush let me hug you" thing, this requires repeatedly seriously jostling the baby hard enough to pinch it's airway off or bounce it's brain off the inside of it's skull. Usually repeatedly.

>>jncfhn+Gv
> And… what exactly is achieved by this sort of justice system?

It suppresses the rate of vigilante justice. If the courts can generally do a better job than the vigilantes themselves, then society comes out ahead.

If we were to live in a society where parents can abuse their children to death and receive nothing more than a scolding from the state to be more careful in the future, then we'd have a lot more people killing each other in retribution. And once that starts in earnest, it often forms unending blood feuds. At the very least, imprisonment for manslaughter is warranted. For the state to mete out no punishment at all would be an abdication of their duty to deliver justice so that others don't have to seek it themselves.

>>mcpack+hB
If blood feuds become that much of an intractable issue, why not target those regions for fentanyl-powered self-mollification?

That's obviously a galaxy brain argument, but what's to stop someone from going Tim McVeigh over a routine miscarriage of justice?

>>BeFlat+3D
What?

>>mcpack+hB
I don't quite follow. If a child dies due to abuse by a single parent, who is it who you suppose would become a vigilante? The child is unlikely to have had any adult friends or relations that would want retribution so much that they kill the late child's parent.

If this was manslaughter/murder of an unrelated adult, then I could see that there could conceivably be some friends or relations inspired to vigilantism, but this thread has mainly been about manslaughter of children by parents due to incompetence.

>>vorpal+Qy
I’m not saying it’s “let me hug you” I’m saying it’s out of desperation. And one of the biggest ways to avoid it is EDUCATION for parents who do not know better. Because most cases of this are not people intentionally murdering children but people who are at their wits end and desperately need help, the bare minimum of which is a mental note that this particular form of desperate exhaustion is dangerous to the child.

And as a general rule, KILLING people because they made a mistake is really fucking dumb.

>>mcpack+hB
There are few enough death squads of vigilantes waiting for their chance to murder parents who accidentally killed their children that we can disregard this as a meaningful threat.

SBS deaths are largely vastly different from intentionally abusive parents. These are accidental harms.

Also sorry but… what? You seem to be proposing that if the law doesn’t support a very specific standard of Justice that vigilantes are the logical consequence. This argument is not supported by anything and could be applied to any level of Justice.

>>jncfhn+(OP)
People who intentionally killed a kid "accidentally" may well promptly go to the ER to establish plausible deniability.

There may be no clear, bright line making it super obvious who is merely a dumb schmuck without parenting skills and who is a murderer.

We should do a better job of putting out quality parenting info for free and also provide appropriate legal consequences.

>>Doreen+xd1
SBS is overwhelmingly an accidental harm.

WTF do people imagine when they say “murderer”?

>>mcpack+JY
When it's the government committing the unpunished crimes, what else do you think will happen?

>>jncfhn+Bx2
As luck would have it, there is apparently new research out on SBS that you might enjoy reading:

>>37650402