The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 6: Mens Rea
Page 7: Situations
Here’s Clyde. He’s an exterminator called to deal with a rat problem at a store next to the local nursery school.
Clyde in “no rodent” hat giving thumbs-up. School, playground, and bodega in the background.
He knows he ought to be more careful, what with kids nearby, but he’s in a hurry to get home to watch the game, and he just flings pellets of rat poison all over and drives off.
Clyde flinging pellets all willy-nilly. Higgledy-piggledy, even.
Little girl about to take a bite out of a poison pellet.
One of the pellets lands in the nursery school playground, where little Bonnie shoves it in her mouth. She dies, of course.
These kids seem awfully good at dying…
There is a theory that children are motivated by three things: eating, pooping, and harming themselves.
The author is using kids to remove any real possibility that the victim could have known any better (just world theory)