It's been ten days since a jury of her peers found Casey Anthony not guilty of murdering her two-year-old daughter Caylee. In case you haven't watched TV, read the internet, or talked to any people since then, you should know that a lot of folks were upset with this decision.
For celebrities being angry about the Casey Anthony verdict, click here.
For Nancy Grace being angry about the verdict, click here.
Well, turns out you don't have to be famous to hate what happened in the Casey Anthony trial. In fact, over 1.2 million generally not-famous people have started a change.org petition to "keep another case like Casey Anthony out of the courts" by making it a felony for parents to not report a missing child within 24 hours of the child's disappearance. Lawmakers across the country have reacted, introducing versions of "Caylee's Law" in over 16 states, including Ology's home of New York.
I don't want to say "Caylee's Law" won't do anything, because it will certainly have an effect - just not the one petitioners want. The most difficult part about enforcing this law will be determining when a parent knew their child was missing to see if they responded within the 24 hour period. Do you start counting when the child fails to call home and check in, as every teenager on every night ever has a tendency to do? Or do you not count until the parents are absolutely certain that their child is gone? The first option will cause parents to overreport missing persons cases for their children in order to avoid a felony, while the second interpretation leaves the law toothless and ineffective.
It gets even worse when you consider many lawmakers have gone beyond the petition's request to also include a penalty for parents not reporting the death of a child within one hour. As of writing this article, there are no provisions on how the child dies - if the child passes, the parents have an hour to report. This includes tragedies that the police really don't need to know about (such as death to a degenerative disease) or accidents that may also involve the parents (such as a family car crash). To be fair, its hard to imagine a prosecutor bringing charges against a family in a car accident because they didn't call the cops to report their child had died, but why would we want a law on the books that allows that to happen?
Oh, and just for the icing on the cake, the penalty for one of these felonies? Generally speaking, between one and six years jail time and a fine. So even if this law had been around in the Casey Anthony trial, there would have been, at best, a few more years tacked on to her sentence. It's hard to imagine that sentence acting as a substantial deterrent or making anyone happier with the result.
Follow Jonathan Moormann on Twitter: @HeedTheWalrus.
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