I have always taken a dim view of laws passed in reaction to specific crimes. Well intended, they are passed in anger and grief and tend to be over-reactions which actually hamper law enforcement and the justice system. If a child is murdered, for instance, what good does it do to pass a new law making it a crime to murder a child, when murder is already a crime punishable, in many cases, by death. What are we going to do, execute the murderer twice?
Of course, in the aftermath of the Casey Anthony verdict we have a rush to pass "Caylee's Law," making it a crime to fail to report a missing child for more than 24 hours, or the death of a child for more than one hour. My initial reaction was that we need to wait until cooler heads can consider this law, and Radley Balko at Huffington Post has a superb dissertation explaining why that is the case.
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