Rick's got a thoughtful and measured piece up at Commonweal about the effects of the recent same-sex marriage decisions, and particularly the DOMA decision, on various issues relating to religious freedom. You should read it all (I had no idea about Dixville Notch--showing my first generation American colors). Here's the conclusion, which is an interesting reflection on the nature and psychology of claims for exemption generally:
It is easier to respect religious freedom in law and policy when everyone agrees or when governments do not do very much. With disagreement and regulation, however, inevitably comes conflict between religious commitments and legal requirements and, when it comes, the majority tends to take care of itself. What about the rest? In a constitutional democracy like ours, we are generally willing to absorb some costs and suffer some inconveniences in order to accommodate the invocation of rights by dissenting or idiosyncratic minorities, especially when the majority thinks that it has a stake in those rights. For example, America still takes a robustly libertarian approach to the freedom of speech, and protects offensive and worthless expression to an anomalous extent, because most Americans still think that protecting misuses and abuses of the right is “worth it.”
However, as religious liberty increasingly comes to be seen as something clung to by a few rather than cherished and exercised by many, as religious traditions and teachings start to strike many as the expensive and even dangerous concerns of quirky, alien margin-dwellers, and as the “benefits” of allowing religious believers’ objections or religious institutions’ independence to stand in the way of the majority’s preferred policies begin to look more like extractions by small special-interest groups than broadly shared public goods, we should expect increasing doubts about whether religious liberty is really “worth it.” We should be concerned that the characterization by the majority in Windsor of DOMA’s purpose and of the motives of the overwhelming and bipartisan majority of legislators that supported it reflects a view that those states—and religious communities—that reject the redefinition of marriage are best regarded as backward and bigoted, unworthy of respect. Such a view is not likely to generate compromise or accommodation and so it poses a serious challenge to religious freedom.
George Will has a long essay in National Affairs on religion and the American Republic. It's interesting in
parts: as a self-professed "None," Will reflects on the importance (but also the non-necessity) of religion as a support for American public and political life. Here's a fragment:
[E]ven the founders who were unbelievers considered it a civic duty — a public service — to be observant unbelievers. For example, two days after Jefferson wrote his famous letter endorsing a "wall of separation" between church and state, he attended, as he and other government officials often would, church services held in the chamber of the House of Representatives. Services were also held in the Treasury building.
Jefferson and other founders made statesmanlike accommodation of the public's strong preference, which then as now was for religion to enjoy ample space in the public square. They understood that Christianity, particularly in its post-Reformation ferments, fostered attitudes and aptitudes associated with, and useful to, popular government. Protestantism's emphasis on the individual's direct, unmediated relationship with God and the primacy of individual conscience and choice subverted conventions of hierarchical societies in which deference was expected from the many toward the few.
Beyond that, however, the American founding owed much more to John Locke than to Jesus. The founders created a distinctly modern regime, one respectful of pre-existing rights — rights that exist before government and so are natural in that they are not creations of the regime that exists to secure them. In 1786, the year before the Constitutional Convention, in the preamble to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson proclaimed: "[O]ur civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry."
In fact, religion is central to the American polity precisely because religion is not central to American politics. That is, religion plays a large role in nurturing the virtue that republican government presupposes because of the modernity of America. Our nation assigns to politics and public policy the secondary and subsidiary role of encouraging, or at least not stunting, the flourishing of the infrastructure of institutions that have the primary responsibility for nurturing the sociology of virtue. American religion therefore coexists comfortably with, but is not itself a component of, American government.
Religion's independence of politics has been part of its strength. There is a fascinating paradox at work in our nation's history: America, the first and most relentlessly modern nation, is — to the consternation of social scientists — also the most religious modern nation. One important reason for this is that we have disentangled religion from public institutions.
One hears this kind of "fascinating paradox" claim frequently, but what's much more fascinating is that one hears it from both conservative and progressive quarters. For conservatives it reinforces the myth of special American religious vigor that Americans like to tell themselves is a vital source of their collective civic health. For progressives it represents a distinctively American and putatively "pro-religion" argument for keeping religion as far away from politics as possible. American exceptionalism may be out of favor in elite circles, but this particular strain of it dies hard.
The claim is that religion is so vibrant in America only because (or uniquely because) it is so pure, so separate from public institutions. It's an argument that Madison made famous in his "Memorial and Remonstrance" and that Justice Souter has made in his religion clause jurisprudence (see his dissent in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris) and that now George Will makes. It reflects a distinctively evangelical ethic that one sees in full blossom in the writing of Roger Williams (as well as, before him, John Milton), for whom religion could never quite be pure enough--an ethic that hyper-emphasizes the unvarnished, utterly and uncomplicatedly sincere credos of what William James much later would call the gloomily intense "twice-born."
Notice also the individualistic current on which the claim rides. It isn't just that the state is "likely to get it wrong"; that is an argument for disestablishment (although one not available to secularists, since "it" is completely "wrong"). The deeper undercurrent of the separationist claim is that individuals, not entities, are the ones "likely to get it right"--that true-blue, healthfully zesty religiosity depends on a kind of inward exercise of discernment borne from fervent conviction that is always in peril of depurification by associational adulteration. It is a claim made primarily by those whose experience of "bad" religion was group religion-- and traditional group religion at that. And the claim retains at least part of its power because of its still vital anti-clerical, anti-institutional foundations. (On Roger Williams's views on this score, see Philip Hamburger's extended discussion; the claim's full-throated adoption by secular philosophers like Martha Nussbaum has seemed anachronistic to me, but it makes far more sense viewed from the perspective of an autonomous spiritual "seeker" peering through an anti-institutional lens. Andrew Koppelman has a long piece attempting to update it for modern times). Many have made the claim; surely many will continue to do so.
But is the claim true? In part, perhaps, but only with substantial qualifications of a kind that make it problematic. There is nothing inevitable (or "logical," as George Will might put it) about religious strength that follows ineluctably from its complete separation from government. There is no iron law that says: the more we separate religion from government, the stronger religion must become. Such a claim would run headlong into many counterexamples, contemporary and ancient. The ancient examples make the claim appear patently absurd. One wants to ask: "Do you actually mean to tell me that no society which has not observed strict separation between church and state has had a flourishing religious life? So there was no flourishing religious life in any of countless pre-modern societies that existed before Milton or Locke or Roger Williams or whoever got busy?" And to take only one modern case, religion and the state have been strictly separated for some time in laic France and in other extremely secular European countries, and the strength of religious life in those countries is by all accounts much weaker than it was in prior historical periods when there was greater proximity and interpenetration of church and state.
I suppose one might argue that religious weakness in a country like France is the result of the long, noxious association of church and state that preceded separation, and that we just need some more time before a newly flourishing religiosity emerges. That seems highly dubious. Church and state have been separated in France for over a century (since 1905). How much longer is it supposed to take for this delicate flower to bloom in the desert? In fact, it seems much more likely that strict separation of church and state has either contributed to the weakening of religious life in a country like France or (even more plausibly) that it has occurred at a time when religiosity was weakening for reasons of its own--reasons unrelated to, or at least independent of, strict separationism.
If some notion of separation did in fact at one time contribute to a stronger collective religious life in the United States, the reason had little to do with any necessary connection in this respect, and more to do with the unique historical and cultural circumstances of the United States--circumstances in which the Puritan evangelicalism represented by Roger Williams's particular style of fire-and-brimstone, garden-and-the-wilderness religiosity was much more powerful in the United States than it is today. Church-state separation may be a strategy that makes religion seem stronger, provided that one is beginning from the evangelical paradigm of the twice-born soul. But it is a different matter if religion is commonly perceived in wildly different terms and expected to perform entirely different functions.
At any rate, the action of separation on religion's strength in America was situational and circumstantial; it was hardly causal or inevitable; and it is hardly inevitable that a policy of more stringent separationism at this juncture in the country's history and cultural circumstances will result in a more vibrant religious life. Countries with other backgrounds and other histories who look to the United States as a model in this respect may well be misled. The pre-existing evangelical bulwark made church-state separation look like a real shot in the arm for religion, not the other way round.
It is a distinctively lawyerly foible to believe that the weakening or strengthening of broad and entrenched cultural phenomena is caused, or even substantially affected, by a government policy or a court-imposed legal rule. This is not to say that legal policies do not have social effects; of course they do. But the degree of influence often is neither unidirectional nor especially significant. There are signs that traditional forms of religiosity are weakening in the United States: the rise of the "Nones" of which George Will counts himself a member is only one such sign. The gathering strength of the Nones is occurring when religion is as a general matter more "disentangled from public institutions" than at any point in the country's history. Perhaps the Nones and other religio-cultural movements augur new forms of religiosity in America, forms that will eventually supplant the traditional varieties of religious experience. On these matters, see severalposts by my colleague Mark Movsesian, who is studying this issue. But however these changes may go, government policies relating to church and state are likely to have nothing more than an unpredictable and largely incidental effect on these developments.
This time from the European Court of Human Rights, whose decision in Sindicatul Pastorul cel Bun v. Romania appears to adopt a similar methodological approach to Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. See this post by my colleague Mark Movsesian for further details.
The final draft of my review of Steve Monsma's Pluralism and Freedom: Faith-Based Organizations in a Democratic Society, has just been published by the Journal of Church and State. I recommend the book for those interested in the institutional questions that have lately come to prominence in law and religion scholarship and doctrine.
I've posted a few thoughts over here about the possible legal effect that delay in enforcement of the mandate that employers with over 50 employees provide health insurance for those employees might have on the contraception mandate. Those thoughts concern the effect on ripeness dismissals and the compelling interest standard under RFRA. The Becket Fund yesterday issued a statement that seems consistent with my ripeness discussion; given the finality of the rule, one would have to have an indication that the government were reconsidering that finality in order for ripeness considerations to be reactivated. But I am not certain about the title of the Becket Fund statement: "Abortion-drug Mandate Not Affected by Administration's Delay of Parts of Health Care Law." Might there be some effects, even if those effects do not relate to ripeness? Are there arguments about the contraceptives mandate that are affected by the decision to delay on the employer insurance mandate?
It would be useful to have some informed and thoughtful comment about the legal ramifications, if any, on the specific issue of the government's decision to delay enforcement of the "big" mandate on the pending cases involving the "little" mandate, either in response to my thoughts over at CLR Forum or otherwise. I hasten to add that I am not sure at all that there are any such effects; the provisions at issue are distinct. Just wondering.
UPDATE: Over in the comments at Volokh, Professor Jonathan Adler said this:
The problem is that the "big mandate" and the "little mandate" are based in different provisions of the law. One provision requires employers to provide qualifying health insurance or pay a penalty. A separate provision requires employer-provided plans to cover preventative services. The contraception mandate is based on the latter, and the penalties under this provision are far higher. The only way this decision can effect the contraception mandate is that it gives employers the option of avoiding the penalty by dropping their insurance coverage altogether, but they arguably have this option now in states with federal exchanges. The Administration's decision in no way insulates employers from the substantial penalties for failing to include contraception in their plans. In other words, this decision does not ease or delay the burden placed on any of the current plaintiffs.
And I said this in response:
Thanks, Jonathan. I suppose that's right. But might an argument like this work: by delaying the "big" mandate, the Administration is also saying something about the "little" mandate that might be relevant to the compelling state interest inquiry. That is because by delaying implementation of the big mandate, employers benefited by that delay will not need to comply with the little mandate as well. They will not need to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees during the delay. Employees of such employers will not get the benefit of the little mandate right now; the government's interest in getting them access to the benefits of contraception are yielding to the interests of the employers in cost, administration, etc.
So the argument from the point of view of the present plaintiffs might be: if the government's interest in the little mandate really were "compelling" (as that term is used in RFRA), the government would not be taking the steps that it is with respect to delay of the big mandate. It would be moving ahead at full speed to enforce that big mandate, in part to achieve the benefits of the little mandate for all of the employees out there that stand to gain. Instead, the government has chosen to selectively enforce the little mandate only as to those employers who already have a health plan in place. But if the government's interests in the little mandate truly were compelling (in the RFRA sense), then it would enforce that interest uniformly. It would not pick and choose when to enforce it. And it certainly would not permit the economic interests of employers interfere with its compelling interest.
I am not endorsing this argument. Just wondering whether it is a plausible one, even though the provisions are, as you say, different.
Prof. Adler is an astute observer of the constitutional scene and he has a firm grasp of the various provisions of the health care law, so he's probably right on this one. Still, any thoughts on this set issues would be welcome.
In previous posts, I offered some arguments against the propriety of a charge of reckless murder (or depraved heart/indifference murder) in cases where parents who believe in faith healing fail to get medical assistance to prevent the death of their child. There may be some circumstances where such a charge is warranted, but if one stipulates that the parents truly believed in the power of faith healing and also truly believed that interfering with that power would damage the child's chances of recovery, then I have a difficult time seeing how reckless murder--at least of the sort that is codified in New York and Pennsylvania--is the right charge. If you haven't seen it, you should also have a read of Peter Berger's latest column in which he discusses the issue of faith healing, law, and the power of courts to define reality. Professor Berger's reflections, as one might expect, are less legal and more sociological. As always, they are fascinating.
In another faith healing case decided last Monday by the Oregon Court of Appeals (Oregon's intermediate appellate court), State v. Beagley, the court upheld a conviction of criminally negligent homicide for two parents who had failed to provide medical care to their 16 year old child. The child, who was afflicted with a congenital abnormality causing progressive deterioration of the kidney, died after a three month period in which he became increasingly weak. The parents' defense was that they (and their child) believed that faith healing--"prayer, the laying on of hands, and anointment with oil"--would cure the child. The opinion raises very interesting and difficult issues. It's worth a read.
One of the defendants' arguments on appeal was that a conviction for criminally negligent homicide under these circumstances violated their federal and state constitutional and/or state statutory religious liberty. That argument was rightly rejected. But it helps to highlight and, I think, clarify a confusion that sometimes crops up in cases like this. To say that a defendant does not have the requisite mens rea for murder is not the same thing as saying that he is "exempted" from a homicide charge on account of his religious beliefs. The first statement is attempting to pin down his precise mens rea within the framework of homicide under Oregon law; the second statement is saying that irrespective of his mens rea, a constitutional (or statutory) deus ex machina swoops down to lift him out of the state's criminal justice framework altogether.
Oregon defines criminal negligence in a fairly typical way: failure to be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that (in this case) the result will occur, where the risk is of such a nature and degree that failure to be aware of it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation. And Oregon recognizes that omissions can serve as the actus reus where the defendant had a duty to act (as parents do, for example). Oregon has a statute on the books related to faith healing which the court had previously interpreted to mean the following: "[T]he statutes permit a parent to treat a child by prayer or other spiritual means so long as the illness is not life threatening. However, once a reasonable person should know that there is a substantial risk that the child will die without medical care, the parent must provide that care, or allow it to be provided, at the risk of criminal sanctions if the child does die."
In upholding the conviction, the court distinguished a very interesting, but also very confusing, case decided by the Oregon Supreme Court in 1995, Meltebeke v. Bureau of Labor and Industries, involving a civil sanction imposed by the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries on an employer who was accused of religious discrimination by "creating an intimidating and offensive working environment" after proselytizing an employee. The Oregon Supreme Court held that because proselytizing was a constitutionally protected religious "practice," the state could not enforce its labor rule against the employer without violating the state constitution unless it could prove that the employer "knew" that the conduct would result in forbidden discrimination. But--and this is the confusing part--the Oregon Supreme Court distinguished between "conduct motivated by one's religious beliefs" and "conduct that constitutes a religious practice." Proselytism was a religious practice, and therefore demanded that the state prove a knowing state of mind. Other kinds of conduct which are not religious practices themselves but are only "motivated by religious beliefs" do not demand that the state prove a knowing state of mind.
The defendants in Beagley argued that in light of Meltebeke, they could not be convicted of criminally negligent homicide without suffering a constitutional violation. The state, they argued, had to prove that they knew that their child would die by engaging in faith healing and failing to get medical care for him. But the Oregon Court of Appeals rejected that argument. Though it expressed some justified puzzlement at the distinction in Meltebeke between a religious "practice" and "conduct motivated by religious belief," it nevertheless held that "allowing a child to die for lack of life-saving medical care is clearly and unambiguously--and, as a matter of law--conduct that 'may be motivated by one's beliefs.'"
I'm not sure that this statement, however forcefully expressed, is persuasive, but the Court of Appeals was to some extent hemmed in by the confusing language of Meltebeke (Meltebeke was also limited to civil cases).
Setting aside the specifics of Oregon case law, however, there is another fact in Beagley that makes for an interesting parallel with the Philadelphia case. In Beagley, there was evidence that three months before their sons' death, the parents' granddaughter also died from lack of medical care. That evidence was admitted, the court said, to show that it was more probable that the defendants should have known that their son was in danger. It also showed, the court claimed, that the defendants did know that their son was in danger.
I agree with the proposition that this is further evidence that the defendants "should have known" that their son was in danger. But without more facts, I am not certain that I agree with the statement that evidence of the granddaughter's death shows that they "did know" of their son's danger. More evidence about their state of mind would be necessary before concluding that they were conscious of the risks that they were taking.
But in any event, charges of criminally negligent homicide or reckless manslaughter (but not reckless murder) both seem to me to be within the plausible range. And in both cases, Professor Berger is right to say that "by admitting the case[s] in the first place the court[s] already decided that divine healing as a substitute for modern medicine is ruled out by the legal definition of reality." "Reality" here is brought to bear in these cases by the criminal law through the baseline mechanism of criminal negligence: one is criminally negligent if one should have been aware of certain risks and where one's lack of awareness deviates in an extreme way from what reasonable people would do in the face of medical reality.
Rhode Island is celebrating the 350th anniversary of its royal colonial charter this year. The occasion
reminds me of one of my all-time favorite cases in constitutional law, Luther v. Borden, in which the struggle over the representative failings of the charter (nearly 200 years after it came into being) and all of the attendant political intrigue so typical of the Ocean State was deemed nonjusticiable by the Supreme Court. There aren't too many Guarantee Clause controversies any longer, but you can still spot one every so often. As my former boss, Judge William E. Smith, put it to me: "Not much has changed around here since then."
Have a look at this interesting short piece by Professor Scott Gerber (another law clerk veteran of the US District Court for DRI) discussing religious freedom in Rhode Island. Particularly interesting are Prof. Gerber's points about Rhode Island's complicated history and the distinction between "liberty and license."
In light of some reasonable questions in the comments of my faith healing post about the distinction between ordinary recklessness and extreme recklessness showing a wanton disregard for the value of human life of the kind that can support a mens rea of malice (and therefore, in Pennsylvania, a charge of third degree murder), I thought to mention a very recent decision of the New York Court of Appeals upholding the conviction of a defendant convicted of depraved indifference murder. An important caveat: New York has a special, but I think doctrinally useful, history of attempting to pinpoint precisely what the depraved indifference mens rea looks like that does not necessarily map on to Pennsylvania law. But because I believe that the distinction between ordinary recklessness and depraved heart recklessness can only really be understood by comparing the factual particulars in actual cases--and not by recourse to any abstract principle (for those with an interest, I've discussed this issue previously here, here, and here)--and because the facts of the case involve a victim of similar age, the New York case is useful.
In People v. J. Borboni (decided by the Court of Appeals two days ago), the facts showed that the defendant beat a 15 month old child repeatedly around the face and body in a period of about an hour, causing massive damage. The defendant was convicted of what in New York is murder in the second degree (depraved indifference murder of a child) as well as manslaughter in the first degree (intent to cause physical injury to a child; recklessly causing the death of a child). The defendant challenged the sufficiency of the evidence as to both crimes. The standard for conviction of depraved indifference murder is that the defendant evince "an utter disregard for the value of human life," that the defendant "did not care whether his victim lived or died." In addition to that distinct mens rea, the state also needed to prove recklessness as to a grave risk of physical injury or death.
In upholding the conviction for depraved indifference murder, the Court distinguished another case, People v. Lewie (2011), in which the defendant "persistently left her eight month-old son with her boyfriend, whom she knew to be violent and cruel, and the man inflicted numerous wounds on the child, finally causing a brain injury that led to his death," because the evidence was not sufficient to show that the defendant "did not care at all" about her son's safety: "On the contrary, the evidence shows that defendant feared the worst and...hoped for the best." Similarly, the Court distinguished People v. Matos (2012), where the defendant's "intimate partner severely beat her 23 month-old child, resulting in his death" because there was evidence that the defendant did care about her son's life: she "splinted
her son's leg, gave him anti-inflammatory medication, exhibited other measures
to comfort him, and, when she found him bleeding and unresponsive, called 911
for help."
In Borboni, by contrast,
[T]he
jury heard testimony — including medical and forensic proof — that defendant
inflicted injuries on a 15-month-old child by striking or shaking the child so
brutally as to cause four distinct skull fractures. The nature of defendant's
assault on the child rendered his course of conduct more clearly depraved than
had he only suspected that a third party had injured the child. Knowing the
brutal origin of the injuries and the force with which they were inflicted
makes it much less likely that defendant was holding out hope, as Lewie and
Matos perhaps were, that the child's symptoms were merely signs of a trivial
injury or illness....
[T]he
charge of depraved indifference murder here is comprised of more than the
physical assault on the child; it also encompasses defendant's inaction for the
two hours that elapsed between the injuries and death. In light of the child's
vulnerability and utter dependence on a caregiver, defendant's post-assault
failure to treat the child or report his obvious injuries must be considered in
assessing whether depraved indifference was shown. The People demonstrated that
defendant, at the very least, left the child unattended for two hours, either
disregarding, or not bothering to look for, obvious, perceptible signs that the
child was seriously injured. Given defendant's knowledge of how the injuries
were inflicted and his failure to seek immediate medical attention, either
directly or via consultation with his girlfriend, until it was too late, there
was sufficient evidence for a jury to conclude that defendant evinced a wanton
and uncaring state of mind.
The key factual difference between a case like this one and the faith healing case that I discussed yesterday involves the issue of "indifference to human life." I only know what is contained in the report I referenced yesterday, but from those facts, it seems to me that it is very difficult to conclude that parents who believe that God will intervene to save their afflicted child have the same mens rea as someone like the defendant in Borboni. To the contrary, the most plausible conclusion is that they have just the opposite state of mind: they care deeply about their child's well-being and believe that what they are doing is in his or her best interest.
Furthermore, I included the paragraph in Borboni relating to Borboni's delay in reporting the child's injuries to anybody else because it contrasts with what is reported in the faith-healing parents' case. The factual similarity (failure/delay to report in both cases) may mask the issue of motivation. The actor with a depraved heart fails to report on the victim's condition because he doesn't give a damn about the victim. But the faith-healing parents allegedly failed to report because they do care about the child's condition, and they thought that by reporting they would interfere with the child's best chance at recovery.
I emphasize again that I am emphatically not saying that the faith-healing parents do not deserve punishment. And I haven't done the research into Pennsylvania law about depraved heart murder to really know in depth what it requires. But particularly when one is dealing with as fact-specific--and as grave--a crime as depraved heart murder, I also think it's important to try to be precise about the nature of the defendants' state of mind. There are lots of facts still to come out in the Philadelphia case. But in light of what has already come out, there are obvious questions about the appropriateness of a depraved heart murder charge in that case.
There is an awful and very difficult criminal case proceeding in Philadelphia involving parents who failed to obtain emergency medical care for their 7 month-old child. The child died of bacterial pneumonia and dehydration. The parents have been charged with third degree murder as well as involuntary manslaughter.
In this post, I want to focus on the murder charge. Pennsylvania uses the common law term, "malice," to describe this type of murder. In Pennsylvania, murder in the first degree is done with the specific intent to kill; murder in the second degree is felony murder; and murder in the third degree is a catchall category for all other murders done with malice. In Commonwealth v. Overby, 836 A.2d 20 (Pa. 2003), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the following jury instruction involving the charge of murder in the third degree: "Malice in Pennsylvania has a special meaning. It does not mean simple ill will. Malice is a shorthand way of referring to the three different mental states that the law requires as being bad enough to make a killing murder. Thus, a killing is with malice if the killer acted, first, with an intent to kill, or second, an intent to inflict serious bodily harm, or third, a wickedness of disposition, hardness of heart, cruelty, recklessness of consequence, and a mind regardless of social duty indicating an unjustified disregard for the probability of death or great bodily harm and an extreme indifference to the value of human life. A conscious disregard of an unjustified and extremely high risk that his action might cause death or serious bodily harm." In New York, the equivalent of Pennsylvania's third category of malice goes by the name, "depraved indifference" murder (that is, implied malice murder), which I've talked a little bit about before. The parents face up to 40 years in prison if convicted of third degree murder.
In the report noted above, there seem to be two different defenses offered by the parents. But the defenses are conflated in the story in a way that makes it confusing to understand what seems to be the key issue with respect to the murder charge--the parents' mens rea.
The first defense is that they "did not know their baby was sick enough to die." This is a defense that sounds in ignorance. The idea is that if someone lacks sufficient education or background knowledge to form the requisite state of mind, he cannot be charged with a malicious state of mind. Though the parents may have been negligent in the ordinary tort law sense of the phrase, that negligence does not rise to the level of the sort of wanton, 'don't-give-a-damn' recklessness that is necessary to sustain a charge of murder. One highly problematic factual issue with respect to the ignorance defense in this case seems to be that this has happened before. The story reports that four years ago, the parents' two year-old child also died of bacterial pneumonia. Given this history, the defense of sheer ignorance becomes much less plausible, and the charge of wanton recklessness more plausible. If the defense is simply lack of knowledge, then there is a case to be made that when the very same disease afflicts a second child, it becomes more difficult to argue that the parents were not consciously disregarding a very high risk of death or serious bodily harm to the child in a way manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.
But things might be different with respect to the second defense: that they believed and trusted that God would heal their child. Here the idea would be that notwithstanding what had happened in the past, they continued to believe that God would intervene to stop death. And the reason that they failed to report on the child's condition to state authorities was not that they were unaware that the child's condition was mortal, but that the power of God's "cure" would be compromised if they reported. (Incidentally, some people have argued that exempting parents from the full arsenal of criminal liability will make it more likely that parents will fail to report. But I'd like to see the statistics supporting those claims: as a matter of intuition--I have not studied the matter--it's not clear to me that the incidence of failure to report will increase unless the full range of criminal liability is brought to bear).
One might argue that the charge of third degree murder based on extreme indifference to the value of human life is equally applicable here. But I am not so sure. If the defense is accurate, then it seems to me that what the parents manifest is not indifference, but true (from their perspective) concern. There may be exceptional cases of course--parents who truly do desire the death of their children. But as a general matter, from the parents' perspective, they are not consciously disregarding an unjustifiable risk in a way that manifested their extreme indifference to the value of human life. They were consciously doing what they believed was in the best interests of their child. When the defense is ignorance of the danger of a particular disease, though the defense might work in the case of the first child, that ignorance becomes much more difficult to claim in the case of a second child suffering from precisely the same medical condition as the first. But when the defense is belief in the power of faith healing, it does not seem to me that the same mens rea progression is at work. In fact, the parents may believe that the risk to their children is not great, but very small, just in virtue of their belief that though things may look bad, God will intervene. The fact that God did not intervene last time does not vitiate the chances that he will probably intervene this time.
In sum: (1) the faith healing defense seems to me stronger in this case than the defense of ignorance; (2) it does not seem to me that, if one accepts the faith-healing defense, the parents are in the same category as other people who act with wanton disregard for the value of human life; and (3) the truly tough question is whether these parents are different from other parents whose gross neglect results in their children's death.
Check out Claudia Haupt's first post over at CLR Forum. Claudia is a fellow at Columbia Law School and the author of a fine book dealing with the law and religion regimes of the US and Germany. Her post makes a very interesting comparative point about "neutrality" in the law and rhetoric of the US and Germany. As she puts it, "From a comparative perspective, it might be tempting to assume that the courts say the same thing about the relationship between church and state, because they are both using the term neutrality. But we have to look beneath the surface. The meaning of neutrality evolved contextually, separately in each system. If we take the language of neutrality at face value, without regard to history and context, we fall into the convergence trap: we see one thing that looks just like the other thing, and we assume they’re substantively the same."
Claudia is right that the meaning of a term like neutrality cannot be properly assessed without reference to cultural and historical particulars. The use of the same term inter-culturally creates a mirage of convergence. But an additional difficulty may be that the term lends itself to multiple and (at times) conflicting interpretations within the same legal and cultural system. That can create confusion about a term's meaning as well. At least, this is what I argue in Chapter 2 of The Tragedy of Religious Freedom.
ADDENDUM: I was also reminded of this example from Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom (121-22):
Imagine that the Reds are fighting the Blues. We have no commercial or other relations with the Blues, but we supply the Reds with essential food which helps them maintain their war effort. If we want to be neutral, should we continue normal supplies to the Reds or should they be discontinued? If we continue supplying the Reds, we will be helping them more than the Blues. If we discontinue supplies, we will be hindering the Reds more than the Blues. (I am assuming that even if similar supplies to the Blues will help them, continuing not to help them is not hindering them.)....The[se cases] form a special class where, in the circumstances of the case, not helping is hindering....In [them] two standards of neutrality conflict.
