Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has this post about Caylee's Law. Briefly, legislation has been introduced in many states that would make it a crime to fail to report a child's death within one hour, or a child's disappearance within 24 hours. Some organizations are even calling for a federal law. This activity was sparked by the Casey Anthony case, in which the defendant failed to notify authorities of her daughter Caylee's death or disappearance for a month. Somin thinks that Caylee's law is a bad idea, because it will sometimes be hard to know when the clock starts on a parent -- for example, if an infant dies of SIDS during the night, and is discovered in the morning, has the hour already passed? Further, he suggests that the law may result in overcompliance, with parents reporting children missing almost immediately out of fear of being charged, even though most "missing" children quickly crop up. More generally, he argues that what he describes as "knee-jerk" "overreaction[s]" like this are the result of a combination of a desire to right perceived wrongs and a lack of information about the frequency of the perceived wrongs and the costs of the proposed solutions. He suggests using something he calls "Ted Frank's Law" as a heuristic: "My rule of thumb is a strong presumption that any law named after a victim is poor public policy enacted by legislators who confuse voting against a law with voting against an innocent person." Somin links [...]
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