Dead Children Make Bad Laws That Don't Make Us Safer

A week or so ago America (most American mothers) were outraged when they heard the verdict of the Casey Anthony trial. The prosecutors didn’t have any evidence that Casey Anthony killed her child. People seemed to think the Florida jurors lost their minds. However, I believe Americans are suffering from a fallacy of presumption. The burden of proof is beyond reasonable doubt which means that the jury has to be 90% sure that Casey Antony killed her daughter. I don’t the reason people got upset was because no one really believed a mother would not report her own daughters’ murder while partying in the meantime. There is no doubt however that the odds of Casey Anthony getting arrested for something completely unrelated to this are high.


Now people in Florida want to create a new law called Caylee’s Law which would make it criminal if a parent did not report their children missing to the authorities within 24 hours. Parents would even be guilty if it turns out their child wasn’t even harmed. The problem that might occur is innocent parents would be penalized even if it wasn’t their own fault. If kids decided to sneak out of the house and stay at with a friend the parents would still get in trouble. Should police really be concerned with this when there are must more serious crimes being committed. Advocate groups who I have no doubt have the best of intentions don’t realize the law of unintended consequences. For instance, laws intended for sexual offenders like Megan’s Law and the Adam Walsh may have the best of intentions but the data begs to differ. For instance, the recidivism rate for Michigan was 3.5% for registered sexual offenders. The other 96.5% are first time offenders with no prior felonies or sexually related crimes. A study in New Jersey showed that these types of laws had little effect to decreasing the amount of sexually offenses. Sarah’s Law had similar consequences. The reoffender rate over a 6 year period was only 8.5%. So in essence the vast majority of sexual offenders are very unlikely to commit the same crime again. The punch line really is all of these laws have not made kids any safer yet have probably made everyone else less safe. People in media might make you believe that children are snatched up randomly from crazy people but the chances of a victim knowing their offender are pretty good. Sexual offenses are horrible. However, what about other crimes people commit like murder, burglary, arson etc? Instead of enforcing these laws I would much rather spend more time and energy enforcing existing laws that prevent people from harming one another. Tradeoffs do exist. People have to understand perfection is not for this world or this lifetime.