Solomon Jones has chosen his hill to die on

Philly.com columnist Solomon Jones has chosen his hill to die on, and that hill is named "Those Untrustworthy Sluts Who Dare to Accuse Bill Cosby, a Great Man Who Opened a Door for Me Years Ago, Are Cowardly."

The Bill Cosby I know is a generous man who advised me as I sought to write a book of family humor, introduced me to an editor at a national magazine, and did similar things for many others.

Translation: "He never slipped me a mickey in the rec room! So if he really did drug and rape 'several' women, why haven't they gone to the police? Huh? Huh? Answer me that!"

Every day, there are women who report being victimized by men.

These women -- women who have been hurt, assaulted, damaged and traumatized -- are often looking for nothing more than justice from the system and protection from their tormenters.

And every day, such women take the brave step of reporting what happened to them; not for personal gain, or for media notoriety, but because it is right.

You see, real crime victims, people who have been truly, legitimately, and forcibly raped, get up and dust themselves off and bravely go to the cops right away to see justice done.

I've asked if Jones feels the same way about victims of pedophile priests, but he's tossed the "I gotta go back to work" answer at a couple of other commenters so I imagine I'll get that response eventually myself.

Other writers have written better about why victims of rape and other sexual assaults don't try to press charges or file civil lawsuits, whether immediately or well after the statutes of limitations have run. Victim Barbara Bowman, for example, in asking why it took a male comic's stand-up routine to bring publicity to her accusations -- the title itself of her commentary answers the damn question. Too bad Solomon Jones hasn't read those pieces as part of his work research for this item.

Throw Joe Paterno under the bus

So the Paterno family is rejecting the Freeh Report, a document the production of which was headed by a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and which involved combing over literally millions of communications and hundreds of personal interviews to determine who knew what and when they knew it. Instead, the Paterno family, like O.J. Simpson, has vowed to launch their own investigation to find the real harborer of child rapists at Penn State.

I humbly suggest that the Paterno family needs to shut up and enjoy the proceeds of JoePa's ill-gotten estate. Or, even better, they should throw dear old dad under the bus (suggest: "We're horrified that Joe -- we won't even call him our father any more, but 'Mr. Paterno' -- allowed Jerry Sandusky to rape those children. We're shocked and saddened at the Freeh report and have nothing of substance to add to its almost certainly true and correct findings") and donate the Penn State contract settlement money to a charity that addresses child sexual abuse (suggest: "We've calculated that about $6 million in cash of Mr. Paterno's estate derives directly from his work at Penn State, and we are presenting a check today in that amount to RAINN, on the express condition that they do not name any funds, buildings, or legislative initiatives after Mr. Paterno. P.S. We are never speaking to the media again").

I mean, you are allowed to throw a family member under the bus, even your dad. When your dad protects, allows, and even enables child rape for years, you are allowed to throw him under the bus. You don't even have to wait until he dies.

Scaling up: Allentown School District versus Penn State

The Allentown (Penna.) School District has settled a lawsuit by agreeing to pay $825,000 to 4 plaintiffs who alleged that a 12-year-old boy sexually assaulted them at school, by getting them alone in bathrooms and then attacking them. The lawsuit asserts that the school's response to complaints about the boy, who leaders at the school knew had a troubled history, was "wholly inadequate" (WPVI-TV).

How much does that kind of settlement translate to the Penn State situation, where a predator with a known troubled history assaulted victims in bathrooms (Harrisburg Patriot-News)? How should it scale? Keep in mind that Jerry Sandusky was some 40 years older than his victims; his victims numbered 10 (at a minimum; that was the number in the criminal case); and Sandusky's rapes took place over years, if not decades, while the Allentown assaults spanned only a few months (PDF, p. 2).

The Allentown School District had an operating budget surplus of some $10 million in FY 2010-11 (PDF, see the school district's Finance Reports page); and its FY 2011-12 operating budget contemplates revenues of nearly $260 million (PDF). As I've mentioned before, Penn State has an endowment of over $1.5 billion (PDF); and its proposed FY 2012-13 operating budget contemplates general funds income of nearly $2 billion (PDF, see Schedules I and III).

How much should Penn State pay Sandusky's victims? How should Penn State scale up the Allentown School District's $825,000 for 4 victims to Sandusky's 10? Should it matter that there's a distinguishing factor here, that is, that the perpetrator in Allentown was another minor student, whereas Sandusky was an adult employee, or at least a colleague? Because that said, both institutions were mandatory reporters, whether literally or through the Clery Act, and both failed miserably in their legal duties -- not to mention their moral duties.

An apologia for avoiding an "inhumane result" in Sandusky's case

Philly.com op-ed by Drexel Law prof Daniel Filler fails to use the term "child rape" to discuss what Jerry Sandusky did and what Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, Gary Schultz, Tim Curley, and others (including the campus rent-a-cops) at Penn State failed to report to the police and the federal government:

But there is another lesson to be learned from this horrible story, and it's time we acknowledged it. Penn State's administrators might have buried the charges against Sandusky partly because our national anxiety about sexual abuse has resulted in a lattice of laws so toxic that people are afraid to report it. Although Penn State officials may have wanted Sandusky to stop, they also may have feared the overwhelming consequences of reporting the crime.

Oh, wah, wah, wah! Mike McQueary saw Sandusky raping a boy in the shower, and his bosses "feared the consequences"?

There's no doubt that Penn State administrators were trying to protect the university and its football program. But they were also trying to protect Sandusky and themselves from the tsunami that would follow. I take Spanier at his alleged word that he feared an inhumane result. He isn't alone: Some recent research suggests that some prosecutors shape their charging and plea-bargaining decisions to moderate the effects of current laws.

Here's where, if I were worse at my rhetoric, I'd say that I wish prosecutors seeking to moderate the effects of current laws would get child-raped themselves. But I don't wish that, really I don't. I don't even wish child rape on law school professors. What I'll do instead is point out that a law school professor would have ridiculed me for not distinguishing between a case where the result is "inhumane" and child rapist Jerry Sandusky's case.

An "inhumane result," as even the Georgia Supreme Court figured out, was Marcus Dixon's, where prosecutors won a conviction and a 10-year sentence on an 18-year-old charged with felony aggravated child molestation, rather than misdemeanor statutory rape, for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend, and guess which one of the couple was white and which was African-American. Here, McQueary witnessed Sandusky raping a child in the shower in 2002, when Sandusky was 57 and his victim about 10. Sandusky remained unindicted for another 9 years and unconvicted until a year after that. Which is the "inhumane result" now?


Former president of Pennsylvania State University Graham "don't want to be inhumane, you understand" Spanier in 2003, 2 years after he learned that Jerry Sandusky was a child rapist but did not report the rape to police.

I've got a lot of friends and colleagues, and, you know, I'm not the president of a university with a very important football team, but I have to think that if I learned that a friend or colleague of mine were raping children, I'd report their ass to the police. But, hey, maybe that's a particular character trait of mine that explains why I've never been able to claw my way to the top of a Big 10 school with an endowment of over $1.5 billion (PDF). I've never been a law school professor, either.

Lynn and Sandusky parallels

As you may have heard, verdicts on 2 big cases just came down in Pennsylvania. While former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts ranging from inappropriate behavior to outright child rape, former Philadelphia Archdiocese cardinal's aide -- executive assistant, I guess -- William Lynn was convicted of just 1 count of child endangerment.

Both of these child predator cases involved decades of known criminal behavior and cover-ups ranging from negligent non-reporting to intentional hiding and destruction of documentation. The circumstances surrounding Sandusky's case include possible Clery Act violations, and more than one federal investigation is continuing. (Imagine Penn State losing its federal financial aid funding!) Lynn's case involved a list of abusers that the cardinal ordered destroyed but that one person, in a half-assed, ineffective gesture of minimal concern for the abused children, retained in a secret, locked location for years.

I bring up the Clery Act (text: flip down to subsection (f)) because it effectively makes school administrators "mandatory reporters" of campus crimes and creates a paperwork parallel between the Sandusky and Lynn cases. McQueary's statements to Paterno and the campus police guy should have gone onto paper and become part of the crime log and annual statistics, even if the head of campus police decided it didn't need to go to local law enforcement. And the list that Bevilacqua got should have gone to the parishes, not into a shredder as he ordered. I mean, let's be clear: Bevilacqua should have sent the list to law enforcement; but at the very least parish leadership should have had the information that they were being asked to welcome child rapists into their midst.

Here's Philadelphia D.A. and noted Catholic Seth Williams's take on the Lynn result:



("This should be a lesson, victims of sexual assault need to report the crime [to] law enforcement...not only to the institution that victimized them." Or, as The Onion put it, "Nation's 10-Year-Old Boys: 'If You See Someone Raping Us, Please Call The Police.'")

I'm not a fan of the victim-blaming phrasing in the first part of Williams's statement, but I agree with the overall message, and for both cases. In the face of obfuscation, denial, and vigorous legal defense of child abuse scandals in Massachusetts, Canada, Ireland, and Australia since the 1930s and earlier [1], pedophile priest victims and their advocates cannot reasonably conclude that the Church will ever go to the least trouble of trying to bring the abusers in its house to secular justice. But more than that, outside of church abuse situations, victims need to go to law enforcement way outside of their rapists' organizations. McQueary should have gone to the actual police, not the campus rent-a-cops, when he saw that nobody was looking to have Sandusky arrested for the child rape he witnessed and reported. Clearly, the campus cops are too intertwined with the school administration to act as disinterested law enforcement. I'm not saying that the Penn State campus police should be disbanded and replaced with local and state patrols, but I'm saying that the Penn State campus police should be disbanded and replaced with local and state patrols. What else do you do with a pile of cops whose response to a report of child rape is to ignore federal reporting requirements and merely ban the accused from a single facility?

Which was still better than the Church response. Here's my take on the parallels between the Lynn and Sandusky results:

If Penn State were the Philadelphia Archdiocese, Sandusky would have been quietly shipped parish to parish until he died (maybe in repentance), Paterno would have died peacefully in his sleep at home (oh, wait), and McQueary would have been a low-level church bureaucrat left to take the fall on a two-bit child endangerment conviction.

As one of the Sandusky victim parents said, no one wins. Because even that said, Penn State football will go on this fall and Paterno's estate is likely judgment-proof since the man met his own legal reporting duties, and the Vatican is continuing to hand out mealy-mouthed fake apologies and fight civil liability awards tooth and nail.

Maybe the Vatican wins.

What's killed me throughout both of these cases is the staggering number of people who knew what was going on and said nothing. Note that I don't say "must have known." I'm asserting that people actually knew that Sandusky was raping children and Lynn was a participant in Philadelphia archdiocesean cover-ups, and that these people didn't do anything. I wonder what really made McQueary so shaky and upset after he went to Paterno. Was it witnessing Sandusky raping a child in the shower, or was it having to be a whistleblower against a campus full of people who would riot and destroy property after Paterno was fired for failing to properly deal with (read: report, follow up, expose, fire) a child rapist in his organization?

And finally, if you were surprised that Sandusky's son is also a victim, you're part of the Penn State and Catholic Church problem. And that's not 20/20 hindsight. That's a reasonable interpretation of the facts when a man and his wife have no biological children but have adopted half a dozen boys and fostered other boys from a charity he founded for at-risk boys. (And the man fails a background check for an ordinary volunteer coaching job.) The parents I know who foster and adopt at-risk kids don't select by gender -- except for the molester who adopted my mom, choosing her specifically rather than the brother just a year older than her.

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[1] Here, have some low-hanging fruit.

Neighbors to 26th District: help! 26th District to neighbors: help yourselves!

Captain Mike Cram, Philly P.D. 26th District, showed up late to speak to a town meeting in Port Richmond last week. When residents expressed their concerns that 26th District officers are slacking at addressing both violent crime and nuisance problems in Greater Port Fishington, Cram and A.J. Thompson of the District Attorney's office told them to forget the police and simply engage in self-help. They

suggested neighbors round up 50 or 150 friends to sit out at Conrail or outside known drug houses "to get it into people's heads that somebody's watching." Cram said a shortage of manpower means neighbors must take things into their own hands.

Wild. I'm not sure how the 26th District and the District Attorney's office expects residents to fix blight, end illegal house parties, and eliminate murderous armed robbery by "watching," but evidently that's the solution they're offering.

But for what it's worth, for the past several weeks Leo M. Mulvihill, Jr., the lawyer who lives and works in Fishtown quoted in City Paper's story there, has been doing just that. He's tweeted with @PhillyPolice name-checks when he sees cops driving while talking on cell phones, and regularly posts photos of cops napping in their patrol cars or just generally disrespecting the neighborhood. Here's hoping the cops in the 26th District don't start giving him a hard time for documenting them.

The NYPD can take down a plane if it wants to

The NYPD's commissioner, Ray Kelly, told 60 Minutes that his counter-terrorism unit has the capability to take down an airplane if the issue ever comes up again (video 14:21, start at 5:30).

What?

Now I'm imagining the NYPD with all kinds of small-scale but highly advanced military technology. Pigeon-guided missiles launched from jet-powered, monkey-navigated, remote-controlled suicide helicopters. Laser guns mounted atop the Empire State Building. In the East River, sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. New York City apparently has its own private army of 50,000 men and women protecting Gotham, with "the equipment and the training" to bring down an airplane.

What does make sense, even though it sounds silly at first, is the idea of starting up a cricket league for city kids. Cricket? I mean, what do I, a red-blooded American, know about cricket? But it's huge in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the India-Pakistan rivalry is pretty epic -- so I guess it's crazy like a fox to foster relationships between immigrant kids and the NYPD.

Thoughts? Is New York in 2011 too much like London in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Now that your every move through the city is monitored with video and radiation detectors, have the terrorists won? How credible do you find the claim that the NYPD can shoot down a plane? Please comment. Thanks!

Schumer's "no ride list" for trains is stupid

Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D.-N.Y.) "no ride list" for Amtrak (Reuters) is stupid.

His reasoning is that bin Laden had been planning to blow up some train tracks on or around the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. So there are at least two reasons why Schumer's proposal is stupid:

One, it's closing the barn door after the horses have run out. Bin Laden is now dead, his plans discovered and publicized. I for one doubt that his organization is so well organized that it will just pick up and implement these plans -- which were so inexact or incomplete that they didn't include a precise date or location for the event -- without their leader. And even if they could, why would they keep on with a plan that the government is now aware of?

While it would be dead simple to bring the Northeast Corridor to its knees by strategically blowing up a single bomb somewhere between D.C. and Boston, it's apparently difficult to arrange. I'm actually flabbergasted that it hasn't been done yet. It's like 450 miles of very vulnerable and largely unsecured track. Are terrorists stupid? Incompetent? Badly organized? I don't know. But it seems to be it would be a hell of a lot easier to carry out than the 9/11 operation.

Two, and really I think this is the more important point, how will preventing a suspect from entering onto a train prevent him from planting a bomb on the tracks on which the train runs?

I mean, really.

Deeney on the local papers and TV news not doing their job in Kensington

Over at Phawker, Jeff Deeney on the media dicking around with the Guardian Angels yet not investigating how long rapes and OD's were occurring in Kensington before the serial killer showed up:

What is completely absent from the media coverage of the case is any serious discussion of the prevalence of sexual violence against prostitutes in Kensington that long predated the arrival of the Kensington Strangler. There has been no discussion of police attitudes towards prostitutes who work the Avenue, who universally testify to having previously attempted to make reports about rapes and assaults to unsympathetic cops who told them such reports were a waste of time because prostitutes were making them. Rape and assault, the women are told, is all just part of that "lifestyle choice."

There is a cause and effect between lax societal attitudes towards protecting sex workers and the increasingly violent environment sex worker are forced to work in. [...] Men know they can go to places like Kensington, pick up a girl, rape her, beat her up, and dump her back on the Avenue with little fear of consequences.

Same with Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), Robert Picton (the pig farm murderer in British Columbia), Dahmer, Bundy, and countless others. Their victims were drug addicted women and prostitutes -- but law enforcement has to be made to understood that there is no such thing as an "unsympathetic" victim.

Hate crime numbers are down in Mississippi . . .

. . . when the figures are voluntarily self-reported by law enforcement (WLBT-TV). The ACLU says they'd like to see the state legislature require hate crime identification training as well as mandatory data gathering and reporting. As it is, ACLU and a professor at the nearby law school figure the police are categorizing hate crimes as merely assaults and property crimes.

Jeff Deeney takes a colleague and a camera to the Ave

While the Philly P.D. have been twiddling their thumbs about women in Kensington getting picked off for months by a serial killer, and while other journalists in the city get their stories from police news conferences and data they can gather over the Internet, Jeff Deeney took a Newsweek Daily Beast colleague with a video camera over to the Ave to talk to the actual people who live and work around there. See the results: a woman talks about how the police don't act on reports of rape when the complainant is a drug-sick prostitute; a former addict gives a sightseeing tour of an area where people go to shoot up or die; and a mother of two describes fear and loathing under the El.

Kensington Strangler still not found

Jeff Deeney was on the radio yesterday discussing the still active serial woman-killer in Kensington. After at least 4 recent strangulations -- 2 fatal -- there has not yet been an arrest. A couple of weeks ago, Jeff summarized the reason why:

The city of Philadelphia’s moralistic approach to prostitution that essentially condones sexual violence as a reasonable outcome for a fallen woman to suffer is total fucking bullshit. Better approaches to dealing with prostitution shouldn’t require a serial killer bringing a national spotlight on it in order to have real action after years of status quo.

Three pieces of bad news for women this week

It's been an unhappy week in women's news at the Glomarization homestead.

First, though the lame-duck Senate had nothing to lose, they killed the Paycheck Fairness Act anyway. It wouldn't have made anything newly illegal, but it would have uncapped punitive and compensatory damages against employers who were proven to engage in sex-based wage discrimination, and it would have limited the number of excuses legal defenses an employer could use in a lawsuit. When I say "uncapped compensatory damages," that means just what it sounds like it means: if you prove that you were underpaid because of sex discrimination on account of you're a woman, you may not necessarily win back all the pay that you were otherwise rightfully owed, because there's a cap on compensatory damages. Never mind that there should or should not be a cap on extra, punitive awards over and above the actual deficit in what you were owed -- but as the law is, you can't always get even what the employer should have been fairly writing on your paycheck. This bill would have fixed that unfairness in the damages equation. Here's some context: there have been equal pay laws in place in England since 1970 and France since 1972, but here in the U.S. all the real or imaginary extensions to the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment expired in 1982, three-state strategy notwithstanding.

Second, there's a serial woman-killer on the loose in Kensington. Over on Phawker, Jeff Deeney calls a spade a spade and says that the police are letting the women have their just deserts for getting addicted and then streetwalking to pay for it. And if that isn't a reasonable social solution to the problem, then what is? Oh, yeah: drug addiction prevention and treatment, equal pay for equal work, and, you know, investigating and prosecuting sex crimes, no matter who the victims are.

And finally, in South Africa, the kind of thing that's at the bottom of the slippery slope of societal devaluing of women. At the top, paying women less than men for doing the same work; in the middle, not bothering to go after the rapists and killers of prostitutes; at the bottom: criminal charges of underage sex against a 15-year-old girl who was gang-raped at school (BBC). This is the one where the boys spiked her drink and then other kids videoed the attack with their mobile phones. Within hours, the video was on sale on the Internet, but only after the teachers had had a chance to view it and laugh at it.

Is it Friday yet? Is it time for armed all-women rebellion yet?

Police slow to respond to possible serial killer of women in Philly

There is unanimous agreement among the women working the [Kensington Avenue prostitutes'] stroll that the police feel that sexual violence is simply an occupational hazard that women who choose this way of life should cope with on their own. That a serial killer would view the stroll as fertile territory for finding easy kills among disposable women, to them, only seems a logical outcome of the long standing unwritten police policies that condone the violence against them.

Jeff Deeney at The Newsweek Daily Beast on how the police have been slow to react to an apparent serial killer in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, because he targets prostitutes.

Anyway, here's a composite sketch of the suspect:



Is that an iPod?

Shiny new credit cards

Got home from vacation to find that my credit card had been canceled a week ago due to some security problem at a vendor my card company won't identify. So they sent me new cards and I'm taking a few minutes this morning to update a few places where I have regular charges going onto that card.

Between things like this data compromise and the regular horror stories I read over at the Consumerist blog, is it really any wonder why I still pay most of my bills by check? Imagine if I had all my utilities and everything else that could be automated put on this card! I'd have had to spend all morning, rather than about 10 minutes, switching all the vendors to the new card. Yuck.

What would Thomas More do?

Were you curious to know exactly why the dean of Villanova Law abruptly resigned this week?

Police investigating a prostitution ring in Chester County relied on two customers, including the dean of Villanova Law School, to provide information that culminated last week in a no-contest plea by the man promoting the business, documents show.

Mark A. Sargent, who was appointed dean in 1987, resigned suddenly Monday, citing personal and medical reasons.

According to a report by the Pennsylvania State Police, Sargent was a customer at a Kennett Township house suspected as a site for prostitution when police raided it Nov. 25. He was not charged.

Classy! He's married, he's Catholic, and he's a co-founder of a blog on Catholic legal thinking. Here's what the police caught the married, Catholic, legal scholar doing:

Sargent paid [one of the defendants] $170 for 35 minutes of sexual contact between noon and 1 p.m. on Nov. 25, according to the police report. Sargent said he saw an ad on Craigslist, "got curious," and responded to it, the report said.

Yeah, right, "got curious." He'd heard of the Craigslist on the Internet, and he was curious to know if those news stories about the sex ads were really for true. And then he just happened to decide to drive 30-odd miles from Villanova to somewhere in darkest Chester County for lunch a couple of days before Thanksgiving.

In any event, however implausible his "how'd that happen" defense, he's not going to be prosecuted. Apparently, in most prostitution cases like this one in Pennsylvania,

[c]ustomers are not charged or identified in prostitution busts. [Rather,] authorities use them to build their case and they often testify if the case goes to trial.

And in fact, Sargent was treated with kid gloves when he was arrested:

"If you watch the taped interview, the police are almost apologetic with this guy," [alleged pimp Stephen] Clark said of Sargent. "They told him, 'You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,' and they agreed to contact him at his office, not his home."

And as for the woman whom Sargent paid for a half-hour of sex, she pleaded guilty and got 8 to 23 months.

From Villanova Law's mission statement:

Villanova is rooted in the Catholic tradition that emphasizes the unique value of individual human lives and our endowment with free will. It inspires us to provide a professional education emphasizing honesty, integrity, and responsibility. This aspect of the tradition is embodied in St. Thomas More, whose figure graces the main entrance in Garey Hall, and whose principled resistance to corruption has been an exemplar of integrity for centuries.

What does this mission statement mean to Sargent? Well, a few years ago, when asked to justify Villanova's not providing fellowship money to law students doing pro-choice legal work, he declared, "[Villanova Law's] Catholic identity is not casual, sentimental, or merely historical."

I never did get around to reading Utopia. Maybe I'll put it on my reading list for August.

No woman chooses a late-term abortion for kicks

To better help people discuss the situations in which a woman and her healthcare provider may opt for a late-term abortion, Booman provides a list of fetal conditions you should never, ever do a Google image search for.

Glomarization's heart goes out to Dr. George Tiller's family and patients.

Also: dig this video, presciently screened at an abortion-rights fundraiser on 21 May 2009:

"[D]irectly in the shoulder"

Dig some aerial news video of a car and foot chase leading to arrest. If I'm not mistaken this is from TV station local to Los Angeles.

Question that comes to my mind: why does the TV news man say that the cop kicked the guy "directly in the shoulder"? Does the video look to anybody else that way? Is it not perfectly clear that the cop ran up and simply clocked that man on the crown of his head? What reason at all is there for stating otherwise?

When baby is left in the car

The human brain . . . is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

[I]n situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that's why you'll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

And that's why an otherwise loving, doting, responsible, and conscientious parent may accidentally leave her child in the car all day, to die of hyperthermia. It's also why such a parent should not be charged with a crime when that happens: what's happening in your brain is no different from a day when your morning routine is interrupted, and so you forget to grab your cell phone.

Of course, the consequences are different. But since even the risk of that unspeakable consequence can't make your brain remember to take the baby out of the car, we shouldn't waste police and judicial resources prosecuting a parent who's had this horrible thing happen to them. It's physiologically unintentional.

The most plausible explanation I've heard is that, since cars are made with front airbags now (as opposed to the olden days, when kids rode on a mattress laid over the backseat for the 13-hour drive to Grandma's), kids are supposed to be put in the back. Carseats and boosters seats, too. Worse, babies are supposed to be put facing backwards. You can't even see the top of baby's head in the rear-view mirror when you've put baby back there in the safest position possible. Think of it as a malevolent alignment of the planets when your morning routine has been interrupted, and then baby falls asleep during the ride, and you've unknowingly flipped the bit in your brain that says "baby is at daycare" to "on."

I couldn't have written about these kinds of cases just a few years ago. When this topic came up during our Crim Law class when I was a 1L, I almost had to leave the lecture hall.

15-year-old girl beat down by cops in Seattle area

On 29 November 2008, King County, Washington, police picked up this 15-year-old girl, who was traveling in a car her parents had reported stolen. The officers appear to have asked her to take off her shoes. When she got "real lippy" with the deputies and flipped one of her sneakers at one of them, they went postal on her:



As an eyewitness to King County and Seattle police brutality in Seattle during WTO in 1999, I wasn't too surprised at the conduct in this video. What did surprise me is that the cops didn't take the beat-down out of the room, because surely they must have known that there was a camera recording the encounter.