The DA’s perverse logic has a parallel in the cases where men are labelled sex offenders for life, for a teenage indiscretion that occurred more than a decade earlier–usually for consensual sex with an underage girl. So you have perfectly normal men whose children are forced to suffer harassment, shame, and anxiety throughout their formative years. So much for the protection of children!

Under Texas law, causing bodily injury (which means pain) to someone recklessly is a class A assault. Could the guy who hit me have been prosecuted for assault? No doubt. Should he have? Hell, no.

Putting him in jail would not have made my neck feel better. It wouldn’t have paid for the damage to my car, and it wouldn’t have made the streets significantly safer. It would, however, have cost society a lot of money.

He shouldn’t have been prosecuted for assault. If the cops had been called and had referred the case to the DA’s office, the DA’s office should have declined charges. That’s a proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

The death of a child is a tragedy. But the end result does not determine the cause. Sometimes people are killed because of crime, sometimes negligence and sometimes, it just happens. Sometimes there is no fault to be laid, though that cuts against our grain as we are certain that for every bad outcome, someone must be to blame.

We need to break this cycle of needing to find someone guilty of something every time a bad outcome happens. It blinds us to right and wrong, and does not nothing to eliminate the tragedy.

SHG

There is no question that the prosecutor was acting with the zeitgeist; that’s what politicians do. What passes for “the protection of children” in Texas is often just a big political feel-good suckhole.

A dead child may suggest negligence, but recklessness, which is a much higher standard than negligence, is another question entirely. And when “ninety-eight percent” of the evidence points to the driver being correct, you have to wonder why the prosecutor thought that public resources would better be spent prosecuting the driver than doing something that would actually “protect children.”

(The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of orange flags on kids’ bikes. One of those flags on a four-foot pole might well have saved this little girl’s life. A hundred thousand dollars worth of those flags would go a long way toward protecting children. But nobody ever got elected for spending public money on geeky orange flags.)