Courtney, Cozzie and Caylee

High-profile murder cases do more than grab newspaper headlines and boost the ratings of TV news shows. Sometimes they cause law enforcement officials and politicians, caught up in the raw emotions of the moment, to say or do peculiar things.

Take last month's slaying of 15-year-old Courtney Wilkes at Seagrove Beach, Fla. After suspect Anthony Cozzie was arrested, Walton County Sheriff Mike Adkinson declared that "if he has a soul, it's absent. You don't do what this man did to a child and tell me that he has a soul."

As mere journalists, we're not qualified to say who does or does not have a soul. Neither, we suspect, is the sheriff. His detour into theology seemed odd and out of place.

As did comments from sheriff's Lt. Michael Howell about a beachside memorial ceremony for the victim. "I feel like it's our job to pay our respects," he said. "She was here when she was killed. We were supposed to protect her, and we fell short."

We appreciate Howell's remorse. But the Sheriff's Office can't protect every tourist in Walton County from mischief.

It can't even protect every resident from mischief. Surely he knows that.

And just as surely, legislators in Tallahassee and elsewhere in the country know better than to use bizarre court cases as an excuse for sweeping changes in state law. But some are forging ahead anyway. They think Casey Anthony's acquittal on a charge that she murdered her daughter, Caylee, is reason enough to give us "Caylee's Law."

The idea is to punish parents who take longer than a specified time (say, 24 or 48 hours) to report a child missing. Mom and Dad could be charged with a felony.

It's a bad idea. A child could be abducted and killed, and the case might never be solved, the killer might never be caught, and the only people jailed might be the child's grief-stricken PARENTS — because they tried to find the youngster on their own and didn't immediately call the cops.

An unlikely scenario, you say? Maybe. But so were the circumstances in the Anthony case.

Caylee's Law would turn justice topsy-turvy. We hope that as the hysteria and histrionics over the Anthony acquittal die down, so will legislators' eagerness to exploit this sad affair with ill-considered lawmaking.

REPRINTED FROM THE NORTHWEST FLORIDA DAILY NEWS

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