Sad setting for noticing sentencing differences

With thanks to the many readers who sent me the link, this AP story, headlined “Sentences vary when kids die in hot cars,” provides yet another example of the inevitability of different sentencing outcomes in the most challenging of criminal cases.  Here are excerpts:

Since the mid-1990s, the number of children who died of heat exhaustion while trapped inside vehicles has risen dramatically, totaling around 340 in the past 10 years.  Ironically, one reason was a change parent-drivers made to protect their kids after juvenile air-bag deaths peaked in 1995 — they put them in the back seat, where they are more easily forgotten.

An Associated Press analysis of more than 310 fatal incidents in the past 10 years found that prosecutions and penalties vary widely, depending in many cases on where the death occurred and who left the child to die — parent or caregiver, mother or father:

• Mothers are treated much more harshly than fathers.  While mothers and fathers are charged and convicted at about the same rates, moms are 26 percent more likely to do time.  And their median sentence is two years longer than the terms received by dads.

• Day care workers and other paid baby sitters are more likely than parents to be charged and convicted.  But they are jailed less frequently than parents, and for less than half the time.

• Charges are filed in half of all cases — even when a child was left unintentionally.