(1) You are a prosecutor in the hypothetical State of Mason. All the deaths in the testing cases below have occurred in your jurisdiction.

(2) You lack the resources to prosecute all the cases.

(3) Your job is to identify at least one case where you will declineto press charges.

(4) You must justify your refusal to prosecute by reference to the purposes of punishment.

Your decision not to pursue charges against one of the testing defendants will be made in the privacy of your office and will be final.

Provide a brief explanation of your decision not to charge one of the defendants in the testing cases. The purpose of this exercise is to analyze potential charges based on the purposes of punishment. The purpose of this exercise is notto decide based on the law that ordinarily guides prosecutorial charging decisions or based on the elements of particular homicide or child abuse statutes (that you will learn in later modules of this course).

1. DONTE PHILLIPS Sarah Davis picked up 2-year-old Donte Phillips and drove him to his day-care center. Davis was the director of the center, which was run by a local church and provided services to low-income families. Donte was the only passenger in the center's van that day. Davis and Donte arrived at the center at 8:30 a.m. Donte remained in the van until 4:00 p.m., when his aunt came to take him home. After a frantic and fruitless search for the boy on the center's grounds, Davis realized that she must have left him in the van. She screamed and rushed to the van, where she discovered Donte's lifeless body. The doctor who performed the autopsy attributed the death to heat stroke. In a statement made to investigators, Davis said that when she arrived at the center, she observed other children running around the grounds. Concerned for their safety, she parked the van and went to check on them, forgetting about Donte for the rest of the day. Davis's colleagues characterized her as sensitive, conscientious, and extremely upset about Donte's death. They attributed her mistake to the fact that both the church and day-care center were struggling financially, and Davis was performing a variety of different jobs in an effort to keep the facility from closing.a 2. MIKEY WARSCHAUER At 8:30 on a sunny August morning, Mark Warschauer parked his car in a lot outside his office at the University of California, Irvine. He locked the car and went about his routine as vice-chair of UCI's Department of Education. He returned to the car shortly before noon, where he found police and paramedics tending to a baby's body lying on a stretcher. When Warschauer realized that the dead child was his ten-month-old son, Mikey, he collapsed. Campus police had been summoned at 11:30 a.m. by students who spotted the baby strapped into his safety seat in the back seat of the car. The police reached the baby quickly by smashing the rear windows of the car, but, by then, Mikey had been dead for at least an hour. A pediatrician analogized what Warschauer had done to "putting a child in a greenhouse." Warschauer explained that, on the morning of Mikey's death, he was tired. He and his wife, Keiko Hirata, who was a part-time political science professor, had worked late on a research paper, and Mikey woke them up crying in the early morning hours, cranky over the process of being weaned from his mother's milk. When Warschauer left home that morning, he had intended to drop Mikey at day care before heading to his campus 4office, but he forgot to do so. The couple had no set schedule for taking Mikey to day care. Some days, Hirata did the job. On other days, such as the day of Mikey's death, the chore fell to Warschauer. It had not been easy for Warschauer and Hirata to conceive a child, and they underwent fertility treatments for several years before Mikey was born. They called their son their "miracle baby," and their family and friends agreed that no parents were more attentive or devoted to their child's safety and welfare. Reflecting later on the moment when he first saw Mikey's body, Warschauer sobbed, "It was like death. A knife in my heart.... My life as I knew it was over. I knew right then, our happy lives had ended."b 3. MICHAEL AND ALEX SMITH Susan Smith drove her car to a boat ramp on a lake near her home in Union, South Carolina, and sent the car into the lake. Smith's two young sons were inside the car, strapped into their car seats. Then, Smith ran to a nearby home and reported that her sons had been kidnapped. For nine days, Smith stuck to that story in interviews with the police, and she appeared on national television to plead for the boys' safe return. Ultimately, Smith confessed that she had drowned her sons, and police divers found her car with their corpses inside it. In her confession, Smith mentioned that she had been distraught because her boyfriend had broken up with her, saying that he was not ready to be a parent. Smith also told the police that she had gone to the lake intending to take her own life, but when the car started rolling into the water, she found that she could not go through with her suicide plan. When Smith was six years old, her father committed suicide. Smith attempted suicide when she was 13. After this incident, a psychologist recommended that Smith be hospitalized for depression, but her mother and stepfather refused. When she was 16, her stepfather began sexually molesting her. Smith's stepfather admitted to police that he had fondled her, but no criminal charges were brought because Smith and her mother did not want him to be prosecuted.c 4. IMANI AND JASMINE LAWREY Khalimba Berry found her daughters, three-year-old twins, dead inside her car, which was parked outside her apartment building in Atlanta, Georgia. The cause of death was hyperthermia. That morning, Berry had returned home from her night-shift job, fed her children breakfast, and watched television with them. At noon, Berry went to sleep, leaving the twins in the care of their 11-year-old brother. When she woke up two hours later, Berry could not find the girls. Berry and her neighbors searched the apartment complex for two hours, with no success. Berry then telephoned 911, and the dispatcher suggested that she check her car. She went to the car, and found her children's bodies. She screamed and held them in her arms. Investigators believe that the girls were playing in the car and that they accidentally locked themselves in.d 5. DEVON AND DUSTIN DUCKER One summer morning, at around 3:30 a.m., Jenny Bain Ducker drove to a Holiday Inn in McMinnville, Tennessee, to visit several co-workers who were staying there. Ducker's two young sons accompanied her to the motel, and she left the boys, who were sleeping in their car seats, alone in the car for about ten hours. In the motel, Ducker drank beer and played video games with her friends. According to Ducker's companions, she left the motel room periodically, presumably to check on the boys. However, at some point she fell asleep, due to the combined effects of the beer and prescription medicine she was taking for bronchitis. When she woke up, it was 1:00 p.m. She immediately went to her car and found that one of her sons appeared to be dead. She rushed the boys to the hospital, where both were pronounced dead from heat exhaustion. Ducker and the boys' father were married briefly; both were high school dropouts. According to her ex-husband, Ducker was a neglectful mother. He thought that she drank too much, and he said that he had been planning to seek custody of the boys because he suspected that she was abusing them physically. Ducker's parents pointed out that until recently she had worked the night shift at a local factory; night-shift workers frequently make early morning social visits. Moreover, the children of other factory workers regularly stayed up late and slept during the day, when their parents did.e 6. FRANCES KELLY One morning after breakfast, Kevin Kelly took six of his thirteen children out in the family van to do errands. Kelly's wife was visiting family in Ireland, and he was staying at home from his job as an engineer to take care of the children. Kelly and the children returned to their home on Zimbro Avenue in Manassas, Virginia, at about noon, and Kelly asked three of the older children, including his 17-year-old son, Anthony, to take care of the little ones. Kelly spent the rest of the day doing chores and errands around the house, including fixing the backyard fence, ferrying children to and from school, washing clothes, and preparing meals. At about 7:30 p.m., neighbors discovered the body of Kelly's youngest child, 21-month-old Frances, strapped into her car seat in the van. During the day, the temperature inside the van probably reached 140 degrees. Friends and neighbors said that Kelly was a devoted father and a deeply religious man. As one neighbor put it, Kelly's children were his whole life. But other neighbors remarked that this was not the first time that Kelly had lost track of one of his children. Several months earlier, Kelly had left his four-year-old son behind in a video store. The child was restored to the family only after the police used rental records to locate all customers who had come to the store that day; when the police called Kelly, he rushed over to pick up his son. On another occasion, Frances was found wandering by herself down Zimbro Avenue. A police officer brought her home and warned the Kellys to be more careful.

6. JONATHAN PERRY COURTNEY Donna Mutyambizi parked her car outside a home in North Laurel, Maryland, for her first day on the job as house cleaner. Although she had been warned not to do so, Mutyambizi left her 17-month-old son, Jonathan Courtney, alone in the car. She cracked the car windows to provide ventilation, and she placed a bottle of water and cereal near the child's car seat. She checked on him twice and each time found him sleeping. When she returned to the car about three hours later, the boy was lifeless. She asked a neighbor to help resuscitate the child, but he already had died from hyperthermia. Initially, Mutyambizi told the police that she had brought her son into the house with her. Later, she admitted that she had left him alone in the car, and she explained that she did so because she had no money for a babysitter. She had asked her estranged husband for money, but he refused to give her any. Mutyambizi's husband claimed that she could afford to pay a babysitter, but he said that she had lost confidence in the person who had been caring for the child. When Mutyambizi was 6 years old, her father shot and killed her mother; thereafter, she was raised by several different foster parents. Mutyambizi's own marriage was unhappy. She and her husband argued frequently, and they separated about six months before their child's death. Friends characterized Mutyambizi as a doting parent, and they said she was very worried about making ends meet following her separation from her husband. At the time of Jonathan's death, Mutyambizi was pregnant with her second child.g