DRUG ENDANGERED CHILDREN, ARSON INVESTIGATION, AND CHARACTER HOLIDAYS - 021

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, drug endangered children, arson investigations, and character holidays. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Episode 2-1 on 1-2-2-1. Welcome to episode 21 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction.

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This week's first question comes from Lisa Marie Miles, and you can find her work at writingwildproofreading.com. Lisa asks, "Why isn't it a crime when a mother gives birth to a baby who tests positive for drugs?"

Well, the short answer is that it might actually be a crime. From a law enforcement perspective, we can only deal with laws that are currently on the books. So in the United States it's the legislature, those politicians, particularly at the state level, the state senators and the state assembly members, whose job it is to enact state laws to deal with these issues.

So cops and prosecutors can try to get creative with proving an existing law applies to the circumstances of a particular case that they're investigating. And to that end, I actually found an article from 2015 in the Atlantic, which I will link to in the show notes, and I'd like to read a little bit of that.

"In a 2013 study, published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Lynn M. Paltrow of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and Jeanne Flavin of Fordham University found that nationally, between 1973 and 2005, there have been at least 413 arrests or other state actions against women for their conduct while pregnant. 84% of the women were using drugs. In a November op-ed in the New York Times, Paltrow and Flavin wrote that they had identified an additional 380 cases involving pregnant women since 2005 representing an upswing in prosecutions per year.

Cases like these may become more common as painkillers and heroin addiction increasingly affects infants. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that between 2004 and 2013, the rate of intensive care admissions for infants withdrawing from drugs rose nearly fourfold. Legal actions against pregnant addicts are unusual as far as drug busts go because it was the woman's use not possession of the substance that led to jail. Typically, simply getting high doesn't lead to incarceration."
And now the Atlantic article goes on to say, "The legal justification for such detentions varies by state. Only one state, Tennessee, explicitly criminalizes drug use during pregnancy. In Alabama and South Carolina meanwhile, the state supreme courts have upheld convictions in which a pregnant woman's drug use was considered criminal child abuse. But elsewhere, states have found other legal avenues that allow for the jailing of drug using new moms. About 20 states have specific reporting procedures for state employees who discover that a newborn shows evidence of having been exposed to alcohol or controlled substances. And 18 states consider this type of exposure to be child abuse under civil statutes."

So to summarize another portion of the Atlantic's article, since most state's in the US do not have laws specific to giving birth to a drug addicted child, prosecutors would need to be creative in proving that existing child endangerment laws and elicit drug use laws apply to the specific case they're presenting to the court. In other words, this will be a challenge that involves a lot of work in both a legal sense and in an actual number of hours spent working in order to bring this case to fruition.
As our opioid crisis worsens in this country, and it is getting dramatically worse as we speak thanks to the fentanyl, I anticipate the country will see more opioid addicted babies in the coming years. I think it's a coin flip however on whether this will prompt state legislatures to enact more specific laws.

Now, I say this because it's a political risk to your career as a state senator or assembly member to draft or vote for a law that separates children from mothers, especially now that drug addiction is being viewed as more of a disease than a crime. Of course, this will take a grassroots effort to get laws like the one in Tennessee drafted and enacted elsewhere. When I worked in our special investigations section, our narcotics unit started prioritizing DEC cases. DEC stands for drug endangered children.

So when we kick down the door of a drug dealer, our first priority became proving child endangerment. That meant having the children tested for exposure to drugs, documenting where the drugs were found and whether they could be easily accessed by children, to the point that I started carrying a measuring tape in my search warrant kit in order to photo document that the child who might be 32" tall can reach the meth pipe that we found on top of the 22" tall bedside nightstand. It's been my experience, in California at least, that these DEC cases, these felony child endangerment cases, lead to actual jail or prison time for the drug dealer, unlike a straight drug sales case. And of course, the priority should always be protecting the children. Thanks for your question, Lisa. You can find Lisa Marie Miles at writingwildproofreading.com.

This week's next question comes from Ken Shoemaker. Ken writes, "In arson investigation, we must first determine if a crime has been committed. Who takes the lead if someone has been murdered and their house vehicle has been set on fire? In our area here in McLean County, the sheriff's department has trained first responders to go to the scene. We also rely on the state fire marshal's office. Your listeners might also like to learn some of the cause and origins of the fire. I've been asked this many times. I do have a working knowledge of arson investigation from 25 years as a firefighter. Thanks again, and keep up the good work."

Thank you very much, Ken. And I know that you have been active in our Writer's Detective Q&A group on Facebook, so I really appreciate your expertise and thank you for submitting a question. So Ken will know this, but for the rest of us that are not firefighters, I can start with a little bit of some fire behavior 101. And the fire triangle is if you imagine a triangle with three sides is a simple illustration of the three elements a fire needs to ignite or combust. Those three sides of that imaginary fire triangle are heat, fuel, and oxygen. And I say it's a simple illustration because they've since refined this triangle into a tetrahedron to account for chemical reactions and stuff. So I'm just going to stick with the simple triangle image and not get too down into the weeds when it comes to fire science.

But those three elements, one for each side, heat, fuel, and oxygen, for a firefighter, the goal is to remove one of those three elements to extinguish the fire. So either removing fuel, oxygen, or heat. For an arson investigator, the goal is to determine the cause and often that's a matter of determining the source and type of fuel and/or heat. Arson is commonly used to cover up or attempt to destroy evidence in another crime.

So let's get back to Ken's original question, who takes the lead if someone has been murdered and their house vehicle has been set on fire? In my experience, any time a body is found in a fire, the arson investigators and homicide detectives both get called to the scene. From what I've seen, the homicide detectives would ultimately be the lead as far as piecing together the entire case, but the arson investigators would be the subject matter experts that the homicide detectives rely upon to determine the facts surrounding the fire itself.
So in other words, the arson investigators would take the lead on determining the cause and origin of the fire, whereas the homicide detectives would be responsible for everything else, to include interviewing the family members and witnesses, authoring search warrants, interrogating suspects, et cetera.

Now, unless there's already a dedicated arson task force, the case would be treated like a task force itself where every member on the team plays a specific role, just like forensics handling the CSI portion of a normal murder case, which likely brings up your next question, who would handle the crime scene investigation in an arson murder scene? Well, the answer again is that depends.

The arson investigators might have their own forensics unit especially if they work for a state level fire agency, or the arson investigators might be directing the police or sheriff's crime scene investigators on what evidence needs to be collected. So even though the CSI team is not from the fire department, the arson investigators will be the subject matter experts directing those CSI techs on what needs to be collected. Of course, this is something you can research for wherever you set your story.

And like Ken originally said in his question that my listeners might also like to learn some of the cause and origins of fire, I totally agree with that. So if you'd like to learn more about fire cause and origin determination, I've included a link to Cal Fire's fire investigation 1A student workbook in the show notes. Cal Fire is the name for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. And the workbook will give you some pretty good insight into the role of a fire investigator, the legal aspects of fire investigation, and even tools on how they document a fire scene and determine a fire's point of origin. You can find the link to the fire investigation workbook in the show notes at writersdetective.com/21.

And this weeks third question is one I'm posing to you. So it's more of a holiday based writing prompt really. So my question is this, in 500 words or less, what is your hero's or villain's most vivid holiday memory from childhood, and how has this memory shaped who your hero or villain has become as an adult? If you're comfortable sharing your response, send it to me by going to writersdetective.com/podcast and pasting that response in where you'd normally submit your questions.

That's it for this week. I wish you and yours a wonderful holiday, and I'll be back next week for the last episode of 2018. In the meantime, go do something nice for someone unexpectedly and write well.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Writer's Detective Bureau podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe. If you belong to a writers group, in person or online, I would love it if you'd share this podcast. This podcast is created for you, so don't be shy, submit your crime fiction question or just say hello at writersdetective.com/podcast. Thanks again for listening, write well.