Skylar's Law: memorial crime policy and mediating argument spheres ¹

¹A version of this paper was presented at 16th Biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference in San Antonio, Texas, USA.

ABSTRACT

Crime policy is often created as a reaction to victimization, influenced by personal sphere arguments, and without much consultation with or assessment by technical experts. This is especially true for “memorial crime” policies such as the AMBER Alert expansion, “Skylar's Law” in West Virginia. By analyzing the Judiciary Committee Meeting for Skylar's Law, we show how personal sphere arguments and parental testimony framed and transformed deliberation of the bill's merits into an epideictic moment to honor Skylar. Laws influenced by epideictic norms are problematic as costs and consequences are not addressed. We argue better criminal justice policy requires balancing personal and technical argument spheres, and that legislators should employ phronesis—enacting expertise to mediate public deliberation to address both normative and factual arguments related to the policy.

KEYWORDS:

• AMBER Alert
• spheres of argument
• epideictic
• legislative policy
• criminal justice

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback in honing the arguments of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We used LexisNexis Academic and Access World News to locate national news articles on AMBER Alert cases or policy changes. We categorized statements from law officials and parents/community members, and found themes noted in this essay (e.g. “doing all we can” for missing children and the need to issue alerts for all circumstances).

2. For example, California's Three Strike policy was written by a father whose daughter was killed in a robbery attempt. At first, the proposal did not get traction with legislators; it was only after the highly publicized murder of Polly Klaas that the policy was adopted through a voter initiative. This policy, stricter than other states’, has increased incarceration costs and has not reduced violent crime significantly (Chen 2014).

3. For example, in August 2013, Hannah Anderson was kidnapped by a family friend in California. Four days later, horseback riders spotted Anderson and her abductor camping in an Idaho wilderness, but were suspicious as Anderson was not dressed for camping. A day later, these witnesses saw a televised news story about the kidnapping and contacted local authorities (Dvorak 2013). Although the tip from the riders is not directly from the initial AMBER Alert, most news reported this as an AMBER Alert success story. This case also does not fall under what criminologists would consider a stereotypical stranger abduction as Hannah knew her kidnapper and was not in the same level of danger or likelihood of murder as with typical stranger abductions (in typical abductions, there is an estimated three hour window before a child would be killed by the abductor, hence the logic of using alerts quickly to enlist communities to be on the lookout). See Griffin (2010) and Griffin et al. (2007).

4. AMBER alert is intended for the stranger abductions that account for about 115 cases per year. Alerts are often issued for non-custodial parent related abductions (over half of AMBER alerts are issued for parental abduction situations, nearly 20% of alerts are issued for hoaxes). Parental abductions account for at least 200,000 reported cases per year, and children are returned nearly 98% of the time in parental abductions with or without an alert issued (Griffin 2010; Zgoba 2004b). More common crimes against children include parental neglect or abuse, or the nearly 900 murders of children under the age of 12—almost half of which are caused by someone the child knows (Zgoba 2004b).

5. We are not certain this is standard policy for lawmakers in West Virginia to obtain and post audio of hearings, and assume Miley posted this to draw attention and public support for the measure. West Virginia has a live audio feed of all sessions to which one can listen, but other audio (including this one) from the bill is not archived on the main legislative website. We transcribed the audio and cross-referenced the noted speakers (“Lady from the 51^st”) with members of this committee. References to the meeting are from our transcription.

6. We recognize there is a difference between a “law-on-the-books” and “law-in-action,” where enforcement officials have discretion in how they implement policy. In this case, it is possible that, after State police notify the AMBER Alert coordinator, the coordinator might use discretion to approve alerts for “missing” children, but the current bill is written to not allow such an action.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Pason

Amy Pason (PhD communication studies, University of Minnesota, 2010) is currently an assistant professor and specializes in (counter) public deliberation and social movement rhetoric. This essay is part of interdisciplinary research as part of the School of Social Research and Justice Studies at University of Nevada, Reno.

Timothy Griffin

Timothy “Skip” Griffin (PhD Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, 2002) is currently an associate professor whose diverse research specialties include the AMBER alert system, criminal case processing, and media constructions of crime justice. He is currently developing research related to assessing expert criminal justice opinion on crime policy.

Michael Kwiatkowski

Michael Kwiatkowski is currently a doctoral candidate in the social psychology program at University of Nevada, Reno. He received the Bilinski Fellowship to work on his dissertation research in conflict and mediation, and he served as a research assistant on this project.