Caylee’s law is being introduced in a few U.S. legislatures, the nature of the legislation is to make it a crime to not report your child missing after x number of hours. I imagine after the Casey Anthony aquital the legislation would be rather popular as many believe she should of been punished for something if not just the pure fact she didn’t report her daughter missing for 31 days.
While her actions were a monstrocity, I whole heartedly disagree with this law based on the fact it would place a positive responsibility on people to act, making the absence of action a crime. What is to say that they couldn’t make legislation that states one must “volunteer” time to government projects or hell everyday at 4pm everyone must do a cartwheel, or even participate in “2 minutes of hate”.
As a libertarian, working out my attitudes between minarchy and anarchy, I can at least accept as tolerable negative laws, or laws forbidding certain actions, actions which prevent aggression. But I find it a complete abolition of liberty to assert positive laws on citizens. Excuse me if “positive and negative laws” aren’t exactly widely used terminology but they seemed to fit.
Laws like these serve no purpose but to preserve the state’s appearance as a benevolent protector.
Uh-oh, government let one “bad guy” off the hook? Don’t worry. We’ll enact legislation just to show how much we care. This government is all about correcting its mistakes and serving the people, don’t you know?
The uk media had a similar media overload with one case. The baby p case, was a tragic story of a neglected child that was rerun for months. Mean while there are similar cases like that all the time that get no mention in the media. I do wonder why some cases get so much attention and others none at all. I did not follow this case in detail in the op. But I think it might be a similar case of media hysteria.
While the government official might be acting with the best of intentions they are usually acting on the emotions from the over hyped media. Creating new legislation and changing departments will unlikely not prevent such situations in the future. So it turns out being more of a media show than anything else. Which i think can make the whole situation worse off and if it just went through the court system as the rest do.
The law makes sense in the current framework of thinking about government and the family.
Over in the abortion thread (at the end) we are challenging the idea of the family being a natural obligation. If we arrive at something, it might provide another way of removing the foundation beneath this law.
This. Also, one big effect of “Caylee’s Law” would be to prosecute more people after the child turns up missing beyond x number of hours. Police and prosecutors would love this, of course, because it would make it easier to railroad people into prison - “If you tell us what we want to hear, we won’t charge you with a felony under Caylee’s Law.”