379. The Cliff

A doctor drove his family off a three-hundred-foot cliff. The wife and two kids survived. The criminal case against the doctor has now been dismissed.

The judge dropped all three charges. The reason is that the doctor is, according to doctors, doing well in his mental health program. Doing well in a mental health program is the thing that happened instead of the criminal trial. These are not events in sequence. The doing well is the resolution. The case is dismissed because of the doing well.

I want to describe the cliff for a moment. Three hundred feet is the height of a twenty-five-story building. The family was in a car. The car went off the cliff. The family survived this. (They survived. I want to be clear about this. The reason I keep noting it is that it seems like important context for what came next, which is that the person who drove the car off the cliff is now doing well and the case is over.)

The criminal justice system has a process for events like this. The process involves charges. There were three charges. The charges are now gone. What replaced them is a determination, by doctors, that the doctor is doing well in a mental health program. The mental health program appears to have been more decisive than the criminal proceeding, which took approximately two years to complete and reached the conclusion that the doing well outweighed the cliff.

Nobody in this news item is asking the wife how she is doing. This is not a criticism. It is an observation. The wife survived a three-hundred-foot drop in a car and presumably has opinions about the mental health program. Those opinions are not in the case file. The case file is closed.

The answer, clearly, is to add a wellness clause to all criminal statutes. This will not happen. The cliff remains three hundred feet. The case is dismissed.