On the darker side of the news, there is the story of Neil Beagley, a 16 year old boy who died because his parents are super fundamentalists belonging to a church called The Followers Of Christ, Oregon City. He died with an absolutely treatable urinary tract infection. The family refused to seek medical attention for the boy because of the strict biblical interpretation they cling to. The parents have been charged and found guilty of criminally negligent homicide.

There’s a good review of the details by Allison Smith, along with some rather stinging words about their faith at the JREF website.

It’s sad to imagine someone dying in this day and age of so ridiculous a cause as a urinary tract infection. And I have to admit, I find it hard to imagine the parents as loving creatures if they were able to let their son die like that. I cannot imagine anyone on earth confusing painful urination with cough-due-to-cold, and consider it truly disgusting that they would even attempt to cop that weak a plea. What this boils down to is exactly what the courts found, that the family, through their own negligence, murdered their son. What sickens me is that this happens far too often.

I’m curious, now. If the situation was different and the negligence simply stemmed from the parents not paying attention to their child, or worse, being too stoned on heroin to properly look after the child, would they receive a similar sentence? The parents, doing the bidding of their loving God, are looking at potentially 16 to 18 months in prison. A year and a half. I have no idea if their faith impacted the sentencing at all, so let’s just take a look see, shall we?

After a bit of trying to understand the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission’s web site, I found this document and was able to figure out the grid. It looks like the way this lines up is that criminally negligent homicide counts as Manslaughter II, and the offenders have no previous criminal record. It looks as if my immediate assumption that faith is an impact would be incorrect, unless it had something to do with receiving a charge of Manslaughter II instead of Manslaughter I, which would have resulted in a potential sentence of 58 to 60 months in jail. However, I wasn’t able to determine if this was the case. It says that negligent homicide is a class B felony, but if that is the same as a seriousness of 10 on their scale or not is not known.

Either way, it’s sad news for sure. If anyone wants to dig further into the legislation or knows more about the way these documents read, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Jim