Wielding the Power to Punish Judiciously

Like all prosecutors, Matt Murphy spends a lot of time reading reports about awful things that happen to people -- things that aren’t their fault. Things for which our instincts say someone should pay.

Things like an unattended infant dying in the backseat of a hot car.

Long ago, however, thoughtful people had the bright idea that a society functions better if governed by laws, not instincts.

That doesn’t mean we can escape moments when our instincts crash into the law. Such moments shape the epic battles within our souls between what we want to do and what we should do.

Murphy stepped into that breach two months ago when Irvine police told him about the death that day of 10-month-old Michael Warschauer, who died after his father left him in the car and went to his office on the UC Irvine campus.

On that Friday in August, Murphy, a 36-year-old prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s office, figured he had another one where someone would pay. “My first thoughts on it were that it wouldn’t be a complicated involuntary manslaughter case,” he said last week.

Simply and sadly put, a helpless infant had died. Dad, however heartsick he might be, would pay.

That’s not how things played out. Two weeks ago, Murphy decided not to file charges against Mark Warschauer, an associate professor and vice chairman of UCI’s Department of Education.

I asked Murphy if he said “Oh, no” when he first heard of the boy’s death. “There’s always an element of ‘Oh, no,’ especially in cases involving the death of a child,” he said. “That’s pretty much the first reaction -- ‘Oh, no’ and ‘Not another one.’ ”

But within days, his real work began. Murphy began poring through the 200 pages or so filed by the Irvine Police Department, a department he’s come to trust over the years. He concluded that the father had doted on his son and, as hard as it may be for some to fathom, he had simply forgotten he’d left his son in the car.

Murphy wasn’t done. He paired that finding with his reading of the case law and research of similar cases nationwide. He decided that the “gross negligence” required to justify charges against Warschauer didn’t exist. He could find no California case in which a parent had been convicted for absent-mindedly leaving his or her child in a locked car.

It would make for a dramatic interlude here to say Murphy desperately wanted to file charges. Or that he anguished over the decision not to.

More dramatic, but not true. “I have never in my career filed charges because I was emotionally involved,” Murphy says. “Charging isn’t an emotional thing. As soon as you charge someone based on emotion, you’re not doing it right.”

That isn’t to say prosecutors are automatons -- that they don’t feel something when they file charges in heinous cases. “Most of the time the people we prosecute, they’re very bad people,” Murphy says. In a job that can twist you in a lot of different directions, prosecutors feel the grief of victims’ families and “get to let them know we’re going to put our heart and soul into it to get justice for the people who killed their loved one.”

Prosecutors are granted powers far beyond the rest of us -- powers to size up man’s inhumanity to man and then to act on it.

It’s a power demanding a clear head and pure heart. Murphy did his job well.

Yes, our instincts tell us that someone must pay for an infant’s death.

In the face of that, Murphy kept his cool. In the midst of it all, though, he must also have known that Mr. Warschauer began paying the minute he found out what he’d done to his son.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.