Because the Casey Anthony trial left such a bitter taste in the public's mouth, an Oklahoma woman created an online petition with hopes of passing a law, dubbed 'Caylee's Law.'

'The Caylee's Law petition calls for establishing two new federal offenses: the failure of a parent, legal guardian, or caretaker to notify law enforcement of a missing child within 24 hours, and the failure to report the death of a child within one hour of discovery.

The petition had already received more than 650,000 signatures as of last Friday.

What do you think of this? Is this something that is needed?

I don't think it's needed & is just a knee-jerk reaction. This was a horrible case but people have become entirely too emotionally invested. There's some substantial potential to do more harm than good with something like this. We don't always need more laws. Just enforce the ones we already have.

I actually agree with the law, but it needs stipulations.

CeCe wrote:

I don't think it's needed & is just a knee-jerk reaction. This was a horrible case but people have become entirely too emotionally invested. There's some substantial potential to do more harm than good with something like this. We don't always need more laws. Just enforce the ones we already have.

I was actually surprised to learn it WASN'T a crime to fail to report missing children because given most missing people are dead within the first 48 hours, if you know your kid is missing and you don't tell anybody and don't look for them, if they die you obviously have a very big part in your child's murder.


Now, the thing about it is good parents ARE going to report their kids missing, the only ones who aren't going to report them are the ones who don't care that they're gone, or are glad they are. But as people have pointed out, if this law had already been in effect, they could've arrested Casey for that because she NEVER called the police about her daughter missing, her mother finally did because she got tired of the run around by Casey on the 2 year old's whereabouts. And regardless of how strong the evidence was or wasn't, that bitch deserves more than 1 week's sentence for what she did.

Now at the same time, since failing to report missing kids was not a crime previously, probably a lot of parents who killed their kids were not concerned about that aspect of it. I recently read about a couple who for 6 years NEVER reported their 12 year old foster son missing, because they had killed him and hid his body to keep collecting the checks. I don't know how much good the law would do in cases like that but I can't see how it could do any harm either because like I said, innocent parents will call the police when their kids are missing.

wow! in that case i want to say "where was social services?" They should have been doing home checks on the foster kid.

If the parents do not report a kid missing, then there is something suspicious going on.

I can't wrap my mind around it being a federal offence to not notify of a missing child in 24 hours. Well, not without an age stipulation on that. For parents of teens who work a job, it could be that they don't know their kid is missing for 24+ hours. So, what do we do with those parents of a kid who said goodbye to mom in the morning before mom went to work. Kid gets taken that afternoon, no body every found, and mom doesn't report it until the next day because the kid was supposed to be at work until after 10 that night and doesn't realize the kid never came home until over 24 hours after the last time they saw him?