On Friday 4-year-old Samantha Motyka of Williamsport was supposed to be in day care. Instead, she was dying in the car of her father’s fiancée, who drove to downtown Williamsport and went to work, leaving Motyka alone in her vehicle for several hours in 97-degree weather.

Motyka’s death of apparent heatstroke or hyperthermia — one of two to occur in the past week — has once again illuminated a deadly problem our society doesn’t seem to have the stomach to stamp out on a broad scale.

Since 1998, when Jan Null of San Jose State University began tracking them, 682 hot vehicle deaths have occurred; a whopping 633 of the victims — nearly 93 percent — were children five years old or younger.

About half of these deaths each year are attributed to parents or caregivers forgetting the child was in the car. All of the fatalities are entirely preventable tragedies that have continued to occur at consistent rates year after year, according to Null’s data. So far this year, 21 children — 10 of them younger than a year old — have died in this manner.

And yet only 20 states have laws on their books making it illegal to leave children unattended in a vehicle. That’s fewer than the number of states (22) than have laws regulating unattended animals in vehicles.

In 2013 Pennsylvania passed a law against this stupidity. But it is largely a toothless statute that only authorizes law enforcement to hand out summary offenses to the person responsible.

We need more robust punishment for those who, through willful negligence or potentially fatal forgetfulness, put children in these life-threatening situations.

A better blueprint is a 2013 law passed by legislators in Washington state, which makes leaving a child unattended in a vehicle a misdemeanor and revokes the offender’s driver’s license starting with the second offense.

For good measure, any update to Pennsylvania’s law should also include an educational component, to be served with a court-certified social service provider, that requires offenders to provide the court system with a certificate of completion.

Critics of such a strict approach point out that this can happen to anyone. Parents get distracted and forgetful all the time: “don’t rush to judgment,” the argument goes. Feeling compassion for parents who unintentionally harm or kill their children in this manner and crafting a meaningful punishment for such irresponsible behavior aren’t mutually exclusive acts.

For the past two decades we’ve mostly engaged in the former, and children have continued to die. Perhaps it’s time we tried the latter as well.