I should preface this by saying my knowledge of the law is somewhat fractured, most certainly idealized. Check the comments below, should I be called out on a point of ignorance, and be forced to drastically alter my opinion.

I don’t really know where to begin, so I’ll quote Lisa Provence at the Hook:

Raelyn Balfour, the mother whose infant son died when she left him in the car while she went to work at the Judge Advocate General’s School, was back in the same court today where she was acquitted by a jury of involuntary manslaughter in January to ask that her record be expunged.

To both expound and summarize simultaneously (a feat that likely requires some sort of libation, which I have just procured for myself during the course of writing this parenthetical), Balfour went to work at the JAG school at UVA, and left her nine-month old son in the car for seven hours. She claimed she forgot to drop the child at the sitter. The baby, to put it bluntly, baked to death. Balfour was brought up on two felony counts, second-degree murder and felony child neglect.

The charges were almost immediately reduced to involuntary manslaughter (stemming from criminal neglect), and when the case came to trial, the jury acquitted Balfour, despite there being no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was, in fact, responsible. The common feeling was that the woman was forgetful, but that she had suffered enough. Essentially, she hadn’t been guilty in their mind of criminal neglect, only of a tragic mistake.

I should point out here that the community rallied behind Balfour, and the loudest cry was, in effect, “This never should have gone to trial.”

Today, Balfour was back in court. She was there to try to get her record wiped clean. Because she’s worried that if somebody in the Army sees she was charged with two felonies, she’ll lose her security clearance, which will have detrimental effects on her pension and benefits. The judge — the same judge who had heard the original case — denied the request.

Summary of the summary: a woman accidentally left her son to die, was found not guilty, and now wants there to be no record of there ever being a question as to her innocence, because everybody agreed she should never have been tried.

…am I the only one who feels the need to call “bullshit”?

Of course the case should have gone to trial. That is the entire point of our legal system. We use the process of jury trials to evaluate incredibly difficult situations involving the law. This case was one such situation. Balfour was, by her own confession, responsible for leaving a baby in a hot car for seven hours. Whether or not this was criminal neglect isn’t up for one person to decide. Or two people. It’s for situations like this that we have a jury system. So that a large body of peers from the same community can bear impartial witness upon the facts of a difficult case and make a judgment based on their interpretation of those facts as they pertain to the law. THAT’S WHAT THAT BIG COURT BUILDING IS FOR.

In this case, the jury decided Balfour was not guilty. I bow to their judgment; they heard all the facts, whereas I skimmed an archived article in one weekly paper. My initial, knee-jerk reaction is “You left a baby in a car for seven hours, you most certainly have to be sterilized, at the very least,” but that’s my own personal bitter social darwinist talking. I’m a bad man for saying such a thing, and I recognize that. I certainly don’t begrudge Balfour her freedom.

What I do have a problem with is the idea that an acquittal somehow means abdication of responsibility. Balfour has never denied being the person who forgot that her son was in the car. Call me crazy, but even if you’re not found criminally negligent, you should maybe expect there to be some repercussions. Lose your pension and benefits? Yes, that’s terrible. At least you’re not serving ten years in jail. So suck it up.

In order to justify having a legal record expunged, there has to be “manifest injustice.” This means that there has to be a supreme miscarriage in justice resulting from a verdict. In other words, this should only apply when someone is tried, and the verdict is given, and then through the process of appeal this verdict is proved to be false. From what I understand, the purpose of expunging a record is to remove records of false conviction. Which doesn’t even remotely apply here.

I’m trying very, very hard to maintain some degree of fairness here. There are many things about this whole situation that I would like to rant about, but they seem sort of… mean. I don’t want to discount Balfour’s tragedy. It takes far less work than you might think for me to imagine a scenario where I forget a baby in a car. I doubt very highly it’d be for more than an hour, but I could see it happening, given a lot of extenuating circumstances. I don’t want to paint Balfour as some sort of villain wrongfully released upon the community. I truly believe she meant no harm, and truly believe in her continuing grief, no matter how self-inflicted.

So I am attempting to limit my ire at particular things, primarily the complete misunderstanding of the justice system that pervades our society (i.e. the continuing guilty-until-proven-innocent mindset that allows people to believe that a trial resulting in acquittal should not have happened). Not being able to rant about the other stuff is, admittedly, killing my momentum a bit. And I feel the tendrils of tangent wrapping around my wrists, which is to say, I think we’re rapidly coming to the end. Let it suffice to say that I look at this case as an example of the system working. A terrible thing happened, the person responsible was put before her peers, they passed judgment, the community was happy. Balfour was given a gift: she was allowed to go free. The community forgave her mistake. For her to come back and try to use the system to erase all evidence of it seems ungrateful. The record is valid, it does not need correction.

Also, if the Commonwealth’s Attorney is to be believed, expunging the record wouldn’t actually have any effect on a review of Balfour’s pension or benefits, as apparently the pertinent military regulations would require her to reveal the information anyway. Making the whole exercise utterly pointless, apart from a misguided attempt to move past guilt. Wipe the slate clean, maybe the pain goes away, too. I feel for the woman. But I’m applaud the judge for ruling against her motion.

To be honest, what really prompted what is growing into a rather sizable disdain for the woman is the fact that she held any sort of security clearance. Or rather, not a disdain for the woman, but rather a disdain for the system that would grant her a security clearance. Or rather, that there should be any argument as to whether she should be allowed to keep the aforementioned clearance. I think, maybe, and I’m just talking down my sleeve here, I think maybe if you forget a baby in your car all day, you maybe don’t get to have a security clearance anymore. I think maybe that’s actually, you know, fair. A security clearance implies trusting someone to act responsibly with sensitive information and/or goods, and that sort of trust should, oh, have some guidelines as to who is likely to be deserving of that responsibility. I’d say somebody who accidentally leaves important documents in a car shouldn’t be allowed to have a security clearance; they didn’t act responsibly with something in their care. Babies left in cars? Sort of a no-brainer. You don’t get to handle even the most mundane of classified information after forgetting a baby. If that means you lose some health insurance and have to get a job because your pension is cut off… then maybe you shouldn’t have left a baby in a car for seven hours.

I’ve been out of work for months and have to pay for my own damn insurance, and the worst thing I ever left in the car was an iPod. Maybe I should go to court to have my resume struck from the record.

comment…

I invented a card game in a dream last night.

It wasn’t worth trying to remember; in the dream, we played the game twice, and the first time I won without having to make much of an effort, and the second time I lost before the game was over, without getting to do much. The game mechanic was flawed, the card distribution was unbalanced, and subsequently the game was only fun if you got lucky. Which isn’t much of a game.

It did get me thinking about games, though. Or perhaps, Games. Waking after the dream, on the short 3am stumble to the bathroom and back, I suddenly realized why Poker is so popular. It’s sort of the perfect game. Take a basic rule set built around a fundamental quality of human nature (i.e. to try and make patterns out of chaos), use a centuries-old system of random value allotment (a deck of playing cards), come up with a distribution scheme using that system that minimizes unfair imbalance issues (give each player access to a certain number of cards), and then invent a game play order that emphasizes and rewards play based on the science of probability (knowing how likely you are to get a good hand given the cards on the table) and the art of performance (bluffing and calling bluffs). With a deck of 52 cards, you can play a game that can be taught in a matter of minutes that automatically increases its own difficulty depending on the experience of the players. It is, when played correctly, a game where you are almost always assured that skill will be rewarded. It is Fair.

Which, I thought upon waking this morning, is what makes Poker a Sport. Here I am classifying a Sport as any competitive Game where the rules minimize the effect of chance, where the Game is typically won by the player with the most skill. (Athletic Sports are a subset of Sports for the purposes of this rumination.) Sports are games where looking at average statistics of previous rounds played generally predict an average outcome of future games. I say “generally”, because although sports do favor skill over blind luck, chance events do happen, and humans are humans, and even the person with the most skill at any given pastime will occasionally make mistakes.

I’d argue here that there are only two kinds of sporting events that are enjoyable to watch; well, three if you’re a sadist. The first is watching two sides of high skill play against each other; watching rivals who are both very, very good at what they do is enjoyable simply because extreme competence is fascinating. The second enjoyable experience is to watch a game where normally skilled players make interesting mistakes. Watching people cope with unexpected incompetence is also interesting. The third type of game (that only cruel-hearted people enjoy) is to watch a very good player beat the snot out of a very bad player. Yes, this proves the concept that witnessing competence is fascinating, but it’s hard not to leave feeling bad for the other side. The side that just wasn’t very good.

Which brings me back to Poker. Poker is perhaps even one of the purest Sports. It takes no athletic prowess to speak of, and isn’t even terribly demanding on an intellectual level. Utterly average people can, given dedication and study, become very good Poker players. It is the ultimate in equalization.

I don’t play poker, despite my high opinion of it. I have played a few times in the past, and have discovered the odd determination of most people to remove poker from its position at the peak of the realm of sport. This is to say, when most people play poker, they don’t want to have to be good at it. Instead, they play weird variations, increasing the number of rules to the point where half the cards are wild or blind or cause you to trade hands with the person to your left. People have spent years inventing new ways of infusing Luck back into one of the purest games of Skill mankind has ever come up with. I don’t play poker because I only want to play real poker. And for that, I’d need to gamble, which fiscally isn’t something I can really justify.

(Although it should be noted that for some reason I could never fathom, people still play with actual money after turning their poker games into nearly skill-less exercises in card tossing. Seems to me that it’s more fun to put money on something you have a reasonable assumption of being able to Win without having to flip a coin twenty times. But maybe that’s just me.)

After contemplating the defilement of poker, I was left with the reinforced notion that we, people, have way too much interest in giving in to Chance. I’ve played a bunch of games over the years, board games, card games. I find it interesting to note the different types of people who play games. I haven’t yet quantified them, but I’m sure there are plenty of game theory books that explore the issue (and if not, I should probably start looking for grant money). I am fascinating by players who don’t care that a game is based on Luck. If in playing the game it becomes clear that most of the action of the game is based purely on drawing a certain card, or rolling exactly the right number, I tend to lose interest. Certainly all games must have a randomizing factor to keep from being the same game over and over, but over-emphasis on chance (and here’s where I do the big opinion dance) takes the element of play away from the player. If a game is based too much on the luck of the draw, the player isn’t so much playing the game anymore, but rather watching the game play itself.

And for some, this is delightful. Some people seem to enjoy not having to put much effort into the game, to be able to watch it unfold and delight in having any interaction with it at all. Win or lose, they witnessed a story, and for them it’s enough. For me… I need to feel I have some sort of actual impact on the story of the game. I want to take the elements given to me, and through knowledge of the rules and skill at dealing with random factors, attempt to do something spectacular. When I lose a game, I want to know it was either because my opponent was better, or because I made a mistake. I never seethe more than when I lose a game that, because of the game mechanics and bum luck, was utterly unwinnable from the start.

But then, I’m really big on fairness. I like it when there are rules, and when people play according to those rules. I like knowing that my failures are for a reason, a fair reason, not because of some random thing that was beyond my control. Which is to say, one of the points of playing a game, for me, is to leave Real Life behind for a moment, and enter a world where fairness is actually possible. Life isn’t fair, goes the old chestnut. That doesn’t mean our games shouldn’t be.

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