Lock 'em up!
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The United States has now surpassed 319,000 COVID-related deaths, yet too many Americans continue to ignore simple and potentially lifesaving safety measures with full knowledge that their conduct creates unjustified risk to others. Sadly, this risk not only spreads anxiety and disease but at times also has deadly consequences. There should be no impunity for such reckless conduct.
An American student was jailed in the Cayman Islands last week for violating the British territory's strict COVID-19 rules. The United States needs to start treating the reckless exposure of others to such risk as what it is: a crime. Whether charged as a violation of public health regulations, reckless endangerment or even criminal assault, the bottom line is that at some point people need to be held accountable for their indifference to the health and safety of others they interact with. And with the evolving ability to establish a real evidentiary link between such reckless indifference and a resulting COVID-19 death, even the prospect of involuntary manslaughter prosecution is not out of the question.
Proving such a serious crime might seem implausible, but it's not as much of a leap as some may assume. One example is a recent report about nursing home workers in Washington state whose decision to attend a wedding appears to be directly linked to the deaths of some of their patients. As with drunken driving, where prosecutors can prove a victim’s death was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of a defendant’s recklessness, involuntary manslaughter is an appropriate charge.
Shopping while maskless:It's foolish and selfish to ignore COVID-19 precautions. You're endangering the rest of us.
Criminal prosecution for reckless conduct serves to deter others from putting the rest of us at risk. We recognize prosecuting such cases would be neither routine nor easy, and that it would be challenging to prove a causal link between a defendant’s reckless conduct and a subsequent COVID-19 death. Nonetheless, do these challenges justify continuing to simply shrug our collective shoulders at such blatant, knowingly risky — that is, reckless — conduct? Should those who recklessly endanger the rest of us as the result of this behavior do so with impunity?
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@george-k said in Lock 'em up!:
As with drunken driving, where prosecutors can prove a victim’s death was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of a defendant’s recklessness, involuntary manslaughter is an appropriate charge.
I can't imagine this being possible any time soon.
In order to prove this was the contact, the victim would have to have only the one contact over a very long time.
I know nursing home residents would have limited contacts. But still, it would be hard to be conclusive evidence.
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The United States has now surpassed 319,000 COVID-related deaths, yet too many Americans continue to ignore simple and potentially lifesaving safety measures with full knowledge that their conduct creates unjustified risk to others. Sadly, this risk not only spreads anxiety and disease but at times also has deadly consequences. There should be no impunity for such reckless conduct.
An American student was jailed in the Cayman Islands last week for violating the British territory's strict COVID-19 rules. The United States needs to start treating the reckless exposure of others to such risk as what it is: a crime. Whether charged as a violation of public health regulations, reckless endangerment or even criminal assault, the bottom line is that at some point people need to be held accountable for their indifference to the health and safety of others they interact with. And with the evolving ability to establish a real evidentiary link between such reckless indifference and a resulting COVID-19 death, even the prospect of involuntary manslaughter prosecution is not out of the question.
Proving such a serious crime might seem implausible, but it's not as much of a leap as some may assume. One example is a recent report about nursing home workers in Washington state whose decision to attend a wedding appears to be directly linked to the deaths of some of their patients. As with drunken driving, where prosecutors can prove a victim’s death was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of a defendant’s recklessness, involuntary manslaughter is an appropriate charge.
Shopping while maskless:It's foolish and selfish to ignore COVID-19 precautions. You're endangering the rest of us.
Criminal prosecution for reckless conduct serves to deter others from putting the rest of us at risk. We recognize prosecuting such cases would be neither routine nor easy, and that it would be challenging to prove a causal link between a defendant’s reckless conduct and a subsequent COVID-19 death. Nonetheless, do these challenges justify continuing to simply shrug our collective shoulders at such blatant, knowingly risky — that is, reckless — conduct? Should those who recklessly endanger the rest of us as the result of this behavior do so with impunity?
