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I was watching 48 Hours in my Public Policy class. It was about 4 cases that can be crimes, but maybe not.


Case 1: A family has a pre-mature baby born that is very tiny. The family asked that the child not to be placed on life support. The doctors ignored the families request and put the child on life support. The family asked many times to remove life support. The father later asked to be alone with the child, and when he was, he turned off the the life support machine. The child was dead soon after. He was charged with 1st degree murder, and could serve 15yrs in jail.

Case 2: A highschool honor student learns that her father is dying of cancer. He's not expected live live beyond a year. She wants him to she her graduate, so she works extra hard to graduate early. One day, she and her friends have several shots of vodka. She then drives to school with her friends still drinking. At school, they are caught. She is suspended for one year, while the friends get two weeks suspensions. Is this a fair punishment? Should there be an execption for her?

Case 3: A mother has a child that is a danger to himself and to others. He has every anger problem known to man. He's on an insane amount of drugs. The county offers an ultimatum: Calm down the child or lose him. So the mother does some research and find that marijuana can be used to sedate the kid. She finds a doctor willing to try the treatment. (this is in California, so med marijuana is legal) After a short time, the results are clearly seen. The is no agression shown. Child Services has a problem with this. They say: stop giving the child pot or lose him. Now this lady is really screwed. Should she be aloud to give pot to her 8-year old?

Case 4: will come later, me too lazy to post it here


Feel free to discuss these three cases. If u have any q's, ask, as long as they're not about names, I don't know them.

1 - Is a crime.
2 - Is a crime, you know this already but what you are asking is should the sentence be more lenient!
3 - This is not a crime if these drugs are prescribed by a doctor, she should be able to beat any prosecutor on this

I agree with Corran.

And as for 2, she shouldn't have gotten the shots.

case 1 is a crime... but it was also presenting a moral dilemma to the parents.

case 2 was just unfair. as i see it, she should've been given the same sanctions as her friends.

case 3 had a legitimate loophole.

case 4 nobody has ever been arrested for being lazy.

For Case 2 she did not deserve the same sanctions if, as I understand it, she was the one driving and her friends were just passengers.

and from what i gather, only her friends continued dinking. this is an example of the importance of punctuation marks...

Dude you really need to read the book 'Eats, shoots and leaves'.....

which is about???

Punctuation, you will love it if you picked up on the importance of punctuation in the above statements.

i shall look it up.

have you ever read something without any commas and perioids? it seems taxing to me. not to mention you run out of breath.

my apologies for the off-topic -ness...

I completely agree with your, I hate the lack of punctuation; you will love this book; you will even remember to use semi-colons, as I have done.
look at this http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592400876/qid=1095635411/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-1122090-2631963?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

i just read an excerpt. it's funny.

I have to correct you there; it's hilarious.If you get a chance then read the book, let me know what you think, in fact you could post a review in the book sections here n KMC.

absolutely. it might take me a couple of months to actually read it since i'm a workaholic, but i'll get around to it. i have a trip that requires a 15 hour plane trip. i'd say that's the perfect opportunity.

1. yes, if the doctor truly believes the baby can survive, then its his decision and responsibility to preserve life.

2. drink driving is a serious thing, if she cared so much she wouldnt have been so stupid. got what she deserved

3.as long as its proven to help the child, i believe its ok. no crime

1). I would need to know much more about the condition of the baby before I could comment !

2). The decision was rightly based on the fact that the person who was driving was punished the most. The rest of the story is incidental and of no influence whatsoever to the outcome.

3). I cannot believe that the number of modern drugs that are available for this type of condition were ineffectual but marijuana was.

4), The copy & paste technique takes little effort !

1. Agree with Paps

2. It was fair, if she cared that much she shouldn't have gone out with her friends. She should have known what the conciquences would be.

3. Well, what she did technically wasn't a crime as it was prescribed by a doctor, but on the other hand, there is something else for this kind of condition: it's called rehab.

I can't really take a stand on this. Because in some countries the law is different. If I say those aren't crimes is most likely that a person from another country would not find those cases as criminal. Is the ol' "Law of the land" thingy for me. Now, I can discuss this in an ethical form....but that defeat the purpose of finding the cases criminal or not. Therefore, my best response is to say that whichever the country that those ppl are living in......is up to their own nations to apply the law.

Isn't the doctor breaking the law by not taking the child off of life support in the first place? It's not his job to make that sort of moral decision. If the parents say take the child off of life support, it's his job to do so.

i dont think case one is a crime....the doctor had no right going behind the parents back.....he has no right to play god!

for case one, it is the parents choice whether or not to use liife suport. they can sue the hosp. for dossobeying there wishes. It was their child and if they dont want to use the suport then they shouldnt. that child may have lived the rest of its life in agony just to die at a young age.we treat our animals better than ppl. when they are in pain and cant live on we put them to sleep. Do that to a person and your aressted.

Case one is the difficult one here !

The laws in most countries are against euthanasia and if the ventilator was switched off and the baby was viable then that would have been a crime. If the baby was seen by more than one doctor to NOT be viable then the DNR, ( DO NOT RESUSITATE ), law would come into effect where the parents would have the final say as to resusitate or not.

The moral argument is even more difficult, ( as has already been said ), as that then brings religious values into the mix.

Clearly the implied background to question one is that the parents can ONLY request, not insist, else it would be no moral quandry at all- the Doctors would be obviously wrong.

But I agree with Corran. Just because something is difficult, or even morally grey, that does not stop it being a crime. Number 1 is murder- murder in an apparently humane cause is still murder, it is not a right the father has; you should not break a law like that without acknolwedging the consequences.

Number 2 is the girl caught out- if she cared about her Dad she would not have gone drink driving. You cannot make exceptions just because of her dying Dad, that is unfair on everyone else who gets so caught.

Number 3 is the simple application of official procedures. If Child support says it is wrong for the parent to give the drugs, then tough- it's their call, and not the Doctor's. It seems a very artifical situation- and also, it does not fit the basic topic of the thread. In this case, the procedure is not literally illegal- as noted, the drug is proscribed. What IS illegal, though, is to defy Child support, whose job it is to make these judgment calls. So it is not about it being a crime, the question is- is Child Support right to do that? Whole different issue.

In fact...at least in Britain...If the doctors have decided that the baby is brain-dead then it is up to the parents or the next-of-kin to make the final decision as to when or if to switch off the ventilator.

As we don't have enough information to go on here about the viability of the baby we canot make any presumption about this that would be of any value.

Yeah. But I assume to ethic of the question is that- should the father still be prosecuted for murder for turning off his own baby's life support machine? And that question would have to be in the background of it not having been his decision to have it there (else it wouldn't be there), but that the father is of the belief that the baby has no ethical future. Can the father's altruistic motivations overrule the legal implications?

Any my answer is still no; it's still a crime.

You are right of course that the father's altruistic reasons for pulling the plug would rightly not save him if the doctors had already decided that the baby was viable.

Of course, the question muddles the issue somewhat by saying 'could' go to jail for 15 years, which tends to make people think he WILL. Whilst it is most certainly a crime, it is unlikely that a judge would sentence him as harshly as, for example, a murderer who cuts someone down in the street. Unless 15 years is the minimum tariff?

Yeah...I hate doing this, but I agree again !

The way that the question was asked leaves far too many gaps for us to fall into and to make us go off on imaginary & philosphical tangents.

The family later sued the doctors for malpratice. I don't know the outcome, or even if there was an outcome. The baby's condition was very unstable. I think it was 3 months early. It had a 30-50 % chance of surviing and a 90% chance of perminate brain damage.

The point I want to make with the 2nd case was is it fair that the girl get one year suspension while her friends get just two weeks? I say they should all get equal punishments.

Here's a little more facts on the 3rd case. The doctor never saw the child, and never monitored him after the treatment. I'd say go after the doctot, not the mother.


Case 4: A former cop finds out that her neighbor/friend had sexualy abused her daughter. She went to the cops to demand action, but was not satified with the slow response. She asked the neighbor to come with her in her car. She then sped down a highway at high speeds. After awhile, she stopped, told the guy to get out and remove his clothes. She then forced him to confess. Both of them were later arrested. The ex-cop was charged with Kidnapping with intent to kill. Does the ex-cop have the right to take the law into her own hands? Would it be different if she wasn't a cop? Would it have been different if it wasn't her child?


I will post the outcomes to these cases later. Some may be suprised.

#1 - im undecided if it was a crime, i dont think the parents should have pulled the plug on the baby, but i think the doctor should have listened to the parents, but the baby shouldn't have to die i dont know...

#2 - its a crime, but she should have got the smae punishment as her friends

#3 - it was prescribed by a doctor, therefore it wasnt a crime. if child services tries to take the kid away, they need to hire a lawyer

#4 - i think thats acrime...sort of, i dont think itd be kidnapping, cause the neighbor got in her car willingly...but i dont know how the law works and stuff, might have still been kidnapping, i dont think the with intent of killing should be on there, cause i dont see where she had the intent of killing the guy. but she needs to be fined for breaking the speed limit.

I have already answered 1,2 and 3 so here is the answer to 4:

Never at any time - by law - is it right to take the law into
your own hands.

Many situations could be imagined where natural justice would come into play if the law WAS taken into ones own hands....BUT.... that would never make it right to do so if the law said unequivocally, NO !

1- is a crime unfourtantly ... i would of thought it was from both sides as well , the parents for going ahead with it wit out the hospitals permission and the hospitals for disobeying the wishes of the parents.

2- i forgot wot happened sorry

3 - like u say isnt a crime if it is legal then it will be ok , unless it becomes an out of hand scene where he doesnt use it for his own benefit but sells it instead.

4 - is a crime in my town u see the police discriminating people and they have done nothing wrong , but in this case the person has done something but they still have no rites to do this ...

How can anyone think it is fair for the girl in number two to get the same punishment? SHE was the one driving- surely by any logic, you can see that drink DRIVING is a far more serious offence than drink PASSENGERING. Being a drunk passenger isn't even illegal.

4. ABSOLUTELY a crime. As Papamau says, no-one has the right to assume they control the law like that; for every situation it benefitted, several dozen others would lead to huge injustices. I also very much doubt the other person could be convicted on that basis- a forced confession is no confession. The 'slow' system may have uncovered other evidence subsequently, of course.

Ush, drink-passengering? are you making new terms up?

For #2, the school has no right to punish her for drunk driving. That's nbot the school's job, it's the police. When she was and her friends were caught, she had BAC of .06, which is below the legal limit (.08) There's no way to prove that she was driving drunk.

Well, thanks for adding info AFTER we've made our points, AE, that's a great way to do this...

But actually it so happens that a School does indeed have a responsibility and right to take disciplinary action of its own- you can be expelled for doing drugs, for example. It might be considered harsh of the school, but they still have the right. And, as driver, her wrong was more than that of her friends.

And Corran... yup!