Standing up for the little ones

Michael Lane is a prime example of a problem this newspaper spelled out one year ago.

Lane confessed recently to killing the 2-year-old son of his then-girlfriend in 1991 while she was at church. As he told police, he was high on methamphetamines at the time. He was trying to change the child's diaper when he became enraged by the child's incessant crying.

But while a belated confession shines a long-awaited light on an old case, there is little authorities can do today. Lane was tried for the crime in 1991 and acquitted by a jury. The Constitution's Fifth Amendment prevents someone from being tried twice for the same crime.

In a four-part series last year, reporters Lucinda Dillon Kinkead and Dennis Romboy showed how infanticide — one of the most disturbing and unthinkable of all crimes — often goes unpunished in Utah. Many cases are dismissed for lack of evidence. Often, law-enforcement officers aren't properly trained as to how to collect evidence. Typically, there are no witnesses. And juries often react with sympathy for a parent or guardian who is on trial. Many jurors are parents themselves and understand how nerves can fray, or perhaps they have trouble comprehending how someone could deliberately harm a little child.

In Lane's case, only one juror believed he was guilty, but she changed her vote rather than hold out.

Lane's confession — prompted, he said, by his own conscience — puts the criminal justice system in perspective. Much of the public debate in recent years has been focused on whether innocent people have been wrongly convicted. Thanks to new DNA testing methods, people who have spent years in prison have been released. Experts are questioning the morality of the death penalty in light of evidence showing some innocent people may have been executed.

But this is the other side. Some guilty people clearly are going unpunished as well.

To a large extent, this is the trade-off one must accept and expect when living in a society that values basic human rights. The Constitution provides for a trial by a jury of peers. It provides for an accused to be defended by an attorney. There are rules of evidence.

It is the most fair judicial system ever devised, but it is not perfect.

That doesn't mean, however, that efforts can't be made to make more people accountable for the killing of innocent children.

Too often, child abuse is considered a family matter that friends and neighbors would rather not discuss. Meanwhile, as the series last year made clear, some counties prosecute infanticide more aggressively than others.

Apparently, nothing can be done now to bring justice to little 2-year-old Paul "PJ" Eugene Watts, who would have been a teenager today, had he lived. But this case ought to make everyone involved in criminal justice, including potential jurors, re-examine what could be done to better prosecute such cases in the future.