The main thrust of your argument is that the law shouldn't be expanded to cover situations like this shooting because of disparate impact across races. Seems like the same argument could be applied to laws against theft, rape, murder, the list goes on.
I think a better analysis would compare alleged costs vs. alleged benefits of the change. You touch on it a bit where you seem to accept the tradeoffs in expanding domestic violence and sexual assault. But any strong argument here would have to flesh out both sides of the tradeoff and compare them. As it is, you're just making a fully general argument against criminal laws.
You raise a reasonable technical objection to what I wrote, which is that I don't spell out why I think that DV and sexual assault are different. So to make it clear: DV and sexual assault are both massive societal problems that recur again and again, so the criminal justice system's focus on them is justified.
In contrast, this fact pattern: white conservative parents who apparently recklessly enabled a school shooter, is a total one-off. You aren't expanding criminal liability (with all the problems it entails, including all the racial disparities)to deal with a massive social problem- you are doing it to ensure a result in one very unusual case in order to throw a couple of people who are very unpopular with the left in prison. That's not worth it.
You're kind of contradicting yourself. Either parents enabling prosecution-worthy illegal activities of their children is common and will be prosecuted widely enabling large disparities, putting it in the same category as DV and sexual assault, or it's rare and expanding the law wouldn't have much impact on prosecutions. I think you're maybe using a slippery-slope type argument to say that prosecuting this rare situation will result in prosecution of more common situations because of a racist justice system? But is that the case with other laws? I don't think e.g. DV laws had scope creep because of a racist system, more like changing societal attitudes towards DV (and probably changing laws to increase enforcement, idk).
If I may rephrase your argument, in the DV case, the benefits of preventing very harmful activities is worth the cost of disparate impact. Whereas in the parent-prosecution situation, the benefits are much smaller while the costs remain so it's not worth it. I think that gets at my tradeoff question above, seems reasonable.
(I'm assuming prosecuting this case would be an expansion of the law, I don't know any relevant technical details)
There's no contradiction here. Any expansion of the definition or prosecution of an offense in the criminal law context will potentially be applicable in a wide variety of situations. But WRT DV and spousal abuse, that's worth it, because the societal problems directly addressed by the expansion of enforcement are significant.
In contrast, here, you have a very small number (perhaps 1) case that people want to expand homicide law to cover, but that will also mean homicide law is expanded to cover a bunch of other cases it shouldn't cover.
And no, I never argued that DV laws had scope creep because of a racist system. I simply pointed out that there are issues with disproportionate enforcement against Black people. It's part of the cost of many expansions of the scope of criminal law, so you need to only expand when the benefit of doing so is very significant.
Then you're assuming the legal expansion would cover a large number of situations instead of remaining targeted to instances like this. Maybe that's accurate, I couldn't say, but I don't see why that'd necessarily be the case.
The main thrust of your argument is that the law shouldn't be expanded to cover situations like this shooting because of disparate impact across races. Seems like the same argument could be applied to laws against theft, rape, murder, the list goes on.
I think a better analysis would compare alleged costs vs. alleged benefits of the change. You touch on it a bit where you seem to accept the tradeoffs in expanding domestic violence and sexual assault. But any strong argument here would have to flesh out both sides of the tradeoff and compare them. As it is, you're just making a fully general argument against criminal laws.
You raise a reasonable technical objection to what I wrote, which is that I don't spell out why I think that DV and sexual assault are different. So to make it clear: DV and sexual assault are both massive societal problems that recur again and again, so the criminal justice system's focus on them is justified.
In contrast, this fact pattern: white conservative parents who apparently recklessly enabled a school shooter, is a total one-off. You aren't expanding criminal liability (with all the problems it entails, including all the racial disparities)to deal with a massive social problem- you are doing it to ensure a result in one very unusual case in order to throw a couple of people who are very unpopular with the left in prison. That's not worth it.
You're kind of contradicting yourself. Either parents enabling prosecution-worthy illegal activities of their children is common and will be prosecuted widely enabling large disparities, putting it in the same category as DV and sexual assault, or it's rare and expanding the law wouldn't have much impact on prosecutions. I think you're maybe using a slippery-slope type argument to say that prosecuting this rare situation will result in prosecution of more common situations because of a racist justice system? But is that the case with other laws? I don't think e.g. DV laws had scope creep because of a racist system, more like changing societal attitudes towards DV (and probably changing laws to increase enforcement, idk).
If I may rephrase your argument, in the DV case, the benefits of preventing very harmful activities is worth the cost of disparate impact. Whereas in the parent-prosecution situation, the benefits are much smaller while the costs remain so it's not worth it. I think that gets at my tradeoff question above, seems reasonable.
(I'm assuming prosecuting this case would be an expansion of the law, I don't know any relevant technical details)
There's no contradiction here. Any expansion of the definition or prosecution of an offense in the criminal law context will potentially be applicable in a wide variety of situations. But WRT DV and spousal abuse, that's worth it, because the societal problems directly addressed by the expansion of enforcement are significant.
In contrast, here, you have a very small number (perhaps 1) case that people want to expand homicide law to cover, but that will also mean homicide law is expanded to cover a bunch of other cases it shouldn't cover.
And no, I never argued that DV laws had scope creep because of a racist system. I simply pointed out that there are issues with disproportionate enforcement against Black people. It's part of the cost of many expansions of the scope of criminal law, so you need to only expand when the benefit of doing so is very significant.
Then you're assuming the legal expansion would cover a large number of situations instead of remaining targeted to instances like this. Maybe that's accurate, I couldn't say, but I don't see why that'd necessarily be the case.
Looks like you addressed that today, good article.