Recently, an Anchorage, Alaska jury convicted a woman of child abuse after viewing a videotape that the defendant herself had made. In the video, a five-year-old boy, one of the twins she and her husband adopted from Russia three years ago, is being force-fed hot sauce and then crying loudly in a cold shower.
"Child abuse" cases often raise questions about what actions of a parent should be allowed by law and what shouldn't. Some people find it surprising that there are no exact standards in the law and that what gets prosecuted/convicted depends on the composition of the jury pool from community to community. For example, some cultures permit or even encourage disciplining a child with corporal punishment, while others view nearly any form of corporal punishment as wrong.
The law in California actually allows this variance between cultural standards to exist, by being ambiguous itself. When a jury is seated in a criminal child abuse case, they are instructed by the court that to find the defendant guilty of child abuse, the People must prove that:
1. The defendant willfully inflicted unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering on a child; and that
2. The defendant did not act while reasonably disciplining a child.
If a jury finds both #1 and #2 to be true, they are instructed that they must find the defendant guilty of child abuse.
Obviously, the answers to these questions vary across cultures, communities, and age demographics. There are certain extreme acts that everyone can agree would constitute crimes, e.g., if the child ends up with a broken bone or permanent scarring, nearly everyone would agree that this should not be regarded as "reasonable discipline," and should be considered child abuse under the law.
But what about, for example, belting a child in a manner that leaves welts that are visible for a few days? There are some communities in which a group of sickened, offended jurors would hand down a swift conviction on those facts, but others in which the jury would quickly acquit or even praise the parent/defendant for doing what it takes to discipline their child. It seems unfair or unjust to say something that is a crime in Newport Beach would not be a crime in Westminster, but as any honest Judge, prosecutor or defense attorney will tell you, this particular law can and does result in a disparity of interpretations by jurors, resulting in vastly different verdicts from one community to another or, in the case of Orange County, one courthouse to another.
So did the Alaskan "Hot Sauce Mom" commit a crime under California law? The answer is a clear "it depends." The better question is, would she have been convicted in Orange County? And the answer to that question is also a resounding "it depends." On what? Things like the culture and composition of the jury, if any permanent physical harm to the child was caused by the parent, what the child did to deserve being disciplined so harshly (i.e. whether the parent acted reasonably), and whether the hot sauce was just "hot" like Tabasco, "painful" like Sriracha, or "cruel and unusual punishment," like Ghost Pepper Sauce.
And, of course, a jury will always be less likely to convict in the presence of a good defense attorney, sensitive to the community, the tendencies of individual jurors, and possessing more than a working knowledge of the hot sauce carousel at Joe's Crab Shack.
