Comment by pickleRick243
16 hours ago
> And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.
It's probably true that without a chance of conviction, standard protocol dictates that public resources should not be expended on reopening the investigation. But I was also heavily distracted while reading the article, scanning optimistically for the happy (under the circumstances) ending where justice is served. I certainly don't think there is "no benefit to anybody".
Serious question: if the chance of evidence leading to a convistion is very very small, what would be the benefit of opening an investigation? Just to go through the motions on principle? And what would they even investigate?
One benefit is demonstrating at least a facade of seeking justice. Also, obscuring a crime for personal benefit is itself a crime.
so cops driving around is good enough, they don't have to actually catch criminals because it's it facade that really matters.
1 reply →
There is no potential "principal" here that is distinguishable from posturing and dick swinging.
Unless you find some unforeseeable smoking gun any conviction will necessarily be questionable at best. That doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond saying "we're the prosecutor's office, look how bad ass we are, look how we somehow manage to convict someone decades later, fear us". Never mind the fact that dredging this stuff up is not likely to be good for the family and that odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent so it's not like you're going after a "real criminal".
Investigating a murder is posturing? I really don't understand the "bad ass, fear us" language. Do you consider all criminal investigations to be as frivolous?
> odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent
How can you say that given that the article presents evidence that
> "... someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula
Is that an accident according to you, or do you have any evidence that the article is wrong about that conclusion?
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It's a cost-benefit analysis like many other things. There are limited resources, they should be spent on investigating cases that have a chance of getting closed.
Cold cases might get reopened because of advances in technology or other changes over time.
The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?
When I tried reading into the causes of so-called SIDS it seemed like at least some of the cases were a catch-all diagnosis that included cases where parents inadvertently killed their infants (eg co-sleeping and rolling onto them). Fundamentally I think there often isn't much upside to fully fleshing out the truth of cases where parents have already paid the heaviest price.
Man, SIDS. It's specifically non-specific, but the worry it causes is quite specific.
My daughter, as a baby, always managed to find a way to sleep on her stomach. Wouldn't sleep on her back, but almost magically by comparison would fall asleep lying on her stomach (face to one side or the other, not straight down, obviously - I hope). We tried various combinations of devices, arrangements of pillows and cushions, tight wraps, to keep her lying on her back, but babies are remarkably, if involuntarily, wilful (or she was, anyway, and remains to this day).
I worry about very few things, but for the first few nights we'd regularly get up to check on her, and literally be holding our breath waiting for her to expel hers.
Out of necessity the every-parents-SIDS-fear, from allowing the baby to sleep on their stomach, had to be removed from our psyche so that we could continue to function day-to-day.
Said baby is now, thankfully, a semi-healthily functional teenager. As functional as teenagers get anyway :)
I swear, all the shit they push at new parents. You can see the point to much of it, and it's obviously going to be a very stressful time regardless. But there's the same inescapable bureaucratic dynamic where once something becomes legible, the system pathologically emphasizes those few bits over and over and over, to the detriment of balanced judgement - both your own and most healthcare providers if you try to get some nuance out of them.
It's understandable that they're trying to help the people who might not be the most competent at following the guidelines, because there is still harm reduction to be had there. But it pushes the instruction-followers into the territory of "well, this probably doesn't apply to us because XXX", which is an epistemologically terrible place to be.
We're still joking about how much they repeated the advice to keep the belly button dry, when it was relevant for like maybe two whole weeks.
during covid they actually laid hospital patients face down (suspended i think?) to help with breathing when a ventilator wasnt available. this behaviour reminds me of that, perhaps your baby was doing this to help with breathing? i dont know...
We don't know it was the parents. Could've been a babysitter. Could've been a grandparent. New parents often have help.
> The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?
While "happy" isn't the word I'd use, that seems better than knowing that this could happen to any baby at any time and nothing would be done.
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SIDS was named in 1969, might be related to combined vaccines.
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...
have you read the linked page?
> However, since immunizations are given to about 90 percent of children less than 1 year of age, and about 1,600 cases of SIDS occur every year, it would be expected, statistically, that every year about 50 cases of SIDS will occur within 24 hours of receipt of a vaccine. However, because the incidence of SIDS is the same in children who do or do not receive vaccines, we know that SIDS is not caused by vaccines.