Your Child Is Guilty Of A Fatal Hit & Run

fmdog44

Well-known Member
Location
Houston, Texas
Your child confesses to you shortly after. The person wrongly arrested is convicted. What do you do and and when would you do it? I would guess I would call the police on the day my child told me.
 

I would accompany my child to the police to support him.
Anyone who would allow an innocent person to be convicted of a crime is a poor excuse for a parent. Or a human being.
 

I do have a friend for 40 years who committed a hit and run. It was in the morning. By late afternoon she and her lawyer appeared at the police station. She received no jail time but her life is......................let's face it, my friend killed someone who left behind a young son, now orphaned. Very sad, very shocking. So glad it never happened to me, to kill someone.

I like Gennie's answer very much.
 
I'm having trouble wrapping my mind the time line. If your child confessed to you "shortly after," and then (much later?) the innocent person was convicted, does that mean that you sat all that time with the knowledge that your child was the guilty party, and did nothing about it? Trials don't usually happen within a couple of days of the offense, it usually takes months, sometimes even years. So what was happening during that long gap period, when you knew that an innocent person was being held in jail, and during the trial? You said nothing to the authorities, and now you are wondering what is the right thing to do?

Of course, you would have to call the police on the day your child told you. Waiting for some other person to be tried and convicted or acquitted would be irrelevant and despicable behavior.

P.S. Of course, I realize that this is hypothetical.
 
Yes and with thousands dying everyday all around us all over the world let's all be thankful.:oops:
Inasmuch as most of us with a brain are aware of the tragedies of life on a daily basis, and I pray each day eases the sorrows of our fellow man, I did not think this was a thread I expected to see here on Christmas morning. My choice, I opted out of here for the rest of the day. Justify it any way you like, it was not uplifting at all and Noel is intended to carry this message.
 
As much as it would hurt me to take action, I could never live with myself if I didn’t correct this. I would have a long talk with my child and then stand by him as he faced the consequences of his actions. My love for my children is unconditional, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be much of a parent if I allowed my child to stand by and watch someone else take responsibility for his wrongdoing.
 
No one else would have been wrongly convicted if my child told me something like that. I would immediately suggest that they get a lawyer and then turn themselves in for what they did. If they chose to do something different I would turn them in myself.

Yes I am a parent.
 
There is a dilemma like this in Les Miz, as some may remember. Jean Valjean has heen imprisoned in Paris for stealing a loaf of bread (!) and finally gets paroled. He manages to rebuild his life and becomes a factory owner and the mayor of his town. But he breaks parole on a technicality.
Inspector Javert, who hates him, makes it his life's ambition to find Valjean and bring him back to prison.

He finally finds a man who he thinks is Valjean, as they look very similar. He arrests him, and Valjean has to decide what to do: let an innocent man go to prison for him, or turn himself in.
 
Yeah, @Sunny but it was Valjean's decision, not his daddy's or mommy's. Unless you're Dr. Mengele, if your parent, whom you confided in, opts to make the decision for you, against your will.................I see where the kid got their moral compass from. "I learned it from watching YOU."

I can see saying, "Gosh, son (or daughter) I can't deal with your decision, I'm afraid we must end our relationship, I can't live with it" instead of I'M Turning You In. That's the way you were raised.
 
My parents turned in their son for killing his neighbors. They testfied against in him court. The whole situation broke their hearts. They stood by him through the whole mess. Dad died of heart failure three years later. Mom cried about it off and on for the rest of her life. She lived 29 more years. They were the salt of the earth kind of people. This is not theory to me. It's reality.
 
There was a "Twilight Zone" episode called "You Drive" about this topic: A driver killed a kid on a bicycle & ran away. An innocent person was arrested. Then the car starts acting up & forces him to confess.
 
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My best friend once called me and said her son was wanted by the police and could he come stay in my barn (I lived in another state). It was awful being asked to be put in that position. I said 'no' but felt like a bad friend. She hadn't told me any details but I eventually googled it and found that he'd been in a one car accident where an occupant in the car died, and the story was that the one that died was the driver but the police suspected that my friend's son was really the driver.
My daughter's paternal grandfather once got a call saying that my daughter had been arrested in another state for a traffic accident where she was drunk and that her nose was broken. Luckily her grandfather had a daughter in that state that the caller named so he didn't transfer any money to the caller and instead enlisted his daughter's help to try to find out which jail. After a few hours a family member wondered if it could have been a scam and they tried calling my daughter and she was perfectly fine and had been unaware of all the ruckus. Nobody thought to call me, sighhh.
 


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