So writes Nina Plank in an op-ed column in today's New York Times, discussing the death of 6 week old Crown Shakur, whose vegan parents fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice. The infant weighed 3.5 pounds and died of starvation. His parents were subsequently convicted of murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty.
I don't know Plank's qualifications, though I assume the Times vetted her before running the piece. Further, while I am definitely omnivorous, I have no problem with vegetarians of any sort so long as the ones who refrain from eating meat on what they believe to be moral grounds refrain as well on prudential grounds from trying to argue the point with me. If free range tomatoes are your cuisine of choice, more power to you as long as we're talking only about what you, personally, choose to eat.
The case of Crown Shakur's death, however, points dramatically at what are and properly should be the limits of social tolerance of parental authority over children. That isn't a controversial notion among either liberals or conservatives; they differ for the most part only in the sorts of personal liberty they enthusiastically wish to prohibit. It is, however, a controversial notion among too many libertarians.
Too bad. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree whether, say, corporal punishment ought to be illegal or what minimal level of education parents should be responsible to ensure their children receive or even whether certain vaccinations or other medical attention should be required.
But there is no such thing as a reasonable case for permitting parents to starve their infant children to death. None whatsoever. And those who would argue on ideological grounds for complete parental control over children, unfettered by state interference, are on an equal moral footing with those whose merely different ideology could result in this sort of senseless and entirely avoidable death.
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I'm curious to know how they could be convicted of *both* murder and involuntary manslaughter. Or, on the facts given, how they could be convicted of murder at all. It's been a while since I took criminal law, but I did pretty well in it, and IIRC, the mens rea for it was willfulness. Has the law changed to that being dumb as a post is now sufficient mens rea for murder?
BTW, the purported link to the NYT op-ed is actually a link to this blog.
Thanks, Seamus. The link is fixed. It didn't occur to me that those are indeed inconsistent charges, but you're right. I quoted from the article. Perhaps one parent was convicted of murder and the other of involuntary manslaughter?
But there is no such thing as a reasonable case for permitting parents to starve their infant children to death.
If you're talking about deliberately starving them to death, I'd agree. But as a matter of policy, I'd cut parents a lot of slack about things that risk death or serious injury to them, because I don't want the government coming after me because they're second-guessing some of my own parenting decisions. (For example, I've been known to let my children climb trees, just as I climbed them when young, even though I know that if they fell out they'd probably be dead. When you and I were growing up, that was just one of the risks one took by being a kid. Now I'm worried that it's prima facie evidence of child abuse and neglect.)
(BTW, after reading some of the articles about this case, I see that the prosecutors argued that this was a case of deliberate starvation, and that the vegan diet was just a pretense. That seems the only possible justification of the malice murder conviction and the life sentence. Life imprisonment just for being stupid, even if it does cause someone's death, is wrong.)
Well, I'm not arguing that murder was the right charge, only that nobody could be quite so stupid as not to realize that there was something wrong with a six week old infant weighing 3.5 pounds and that soy milk and apple juice were the overwhelmingly likely cause.
In my experience, it takes a fairly high level of bad formal education for someone to opt for veganism. One doesn't see too many trailer park vegans, if you get my drift, so I wouldn't be inclined to cut the parents any slack at all.
Actually, my parents were pretty protective and didn't permit me to climb trees as an infant. Didn't yours at least warn you of the dangers of accidential hanging after getting your necktie snagged? (I keed, I keed!)
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