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Prepare for more bad news on the Casey Anthony front. Remember Caylee's Law, the proposal that was supposed to protect kids across America from crappy parenting? It was the one bright spot many of us were clinging to in the wake of Anthony's not guilty verdict last summer. But it's growing awfully dim these days.
State after state has tried to pass the law and failed! And sadly, I have to agree with the legislators who have nixed it so far -- even in Casey's home state of Florida, where it's still under debate.
Caylee's Law sounded like a good idea last summer. It really did. The basis of the piece of legislation named for Anthony's 2-year-old would make it a felony for a parent to fail to report a missing child to law enforcement. It was an answer to the news that Casey didn't report Caylee missing -- regardless of the circumstances of the child's death -- and it made us feel like somehow we could have gotten justice for this little girl.
Sounds simple, right? I mean, my job as a parent is to protect my child from harm. If I don't know where she is, how the heck can I do that?
But pure logistics -- as lawmakers have found -- really complicate the heck out of passing a law like this. It is not illegal for parents to spend time AWAY from their kids. And thank God for that, or my husband and I would never have date night, nor would my daughter ever get some good old-fashioned spoiling from her grandparents, and my sanity would be tested. When your kid is going through one of those "stages," let's just say that absence is called for in order to make the heart grow fonder.
So what happens when you -- legally -- spend time away from your kids? You put someone else in charge. You're not a bad parent. And yet, you might not know immediately if your kid disappears. Unless a law is drafted to cover all scenarios, innocent parents can easily get swept up and charged with a felony. But how does one cover all scenarios? Just imagine: a kid at camp, a kid with their grandparents, a kid with a friend's parents, a kid on a school trip ... need I go on?
It's a legal quagmire. No wonder New Jersey is the only one of 17 states that have pondered Caylee's Law that has passed a version.
As much as I'd like to see some sort of good come out of the horrible Anthony case, I'd much rather legislators take their time and really evaluate how their laws will affect their constituents than slap something on the books just to make us all feel better. Otherwise we're not preventing what people think might have happened with Casey Anthony and her daughter. We're just making life harder for good parents.
How about you? Do you see the holes in the Caylee's Law proposal?
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