Don’t be surprised if 18 state senators start showing up for work with bad shaves or crooked lipstick. They may not want to look at themselves in the mirror after what they did to Allen Leech.

The Allen Leech, age 3, who was seriously injured in a horrific crash at the Exit 6A Maine Turnpike tollbooth a year ago. The crash that killed his mother and sister. The crash caused by drunken driver Gary Sledzik. The crash that could have been prevented if State Police had responded to any of the three calls they received from concerned motorists. Or if they’d just bothered to notify local police in any of the eight towns Sledzik roared through during his tragedy-bound 42-mile ride.

Sorry about your mom and sister, 18 senators said the other day in defeating a bill that would have approved $275,000 in compensation for the boy. Sue us.

Knowing full well that the family Barbara Maxfield and 13-year-old Brooke Willis left behind is limited by state law to suing only those who can be proven to have been directly negligent — probably just one trooper and two dispatchers — and then for no more than $10,000 each. Unless the Legislature lifts the immunity that protects it from civil lawsuits. Which it somehow forgot to do.

The $275,000 itself is an insult, it being discounted by lawmakers during committee session from the $500,000 sought by Sen. Mary Small in her bill on behalf of Allen Leech. Cut for no apparent reason other than cutting is what legislators do.

Contrast that with the case of David Prentiss of Limestone, another citizen wronged by sloppy government work. Prentiss was all set to sell his 13-acre property in Limestone last year until the prospective buyer found it incorrectly included on a Maine Department of Environmental Protection list of contaminated sites. The deal fell through and the Legislature is about to compensate Prentiss $70,000 for his trouble.

Then there’s Dan Corey of Monticello. Lawmakers are well on their way to paying him $250,000 because erroneous state testing prevented him from selling his potatoes in Canada. Prentiss and Corey deserve compensation, no doubt. The state messed up. Just not quite as much as they messed up with Allen Leech.

The difference between land and potatoes on one hand and two human lives on the other, of course, is that money cannot buy human lives. But that’s no reason for the state not to acknowledge its negligence, to admit that its agents, its employees, were derelict in their duty. The failure of the State Police to end its long-standing turf battle with local law enforcement, to correct the often-noted interagency communications breakdowns, isn’t really much different than bungled environmental agency paperwork or flawed potato testing.

But the big difference between land, potatoes and human lives is that you can hand a landowner or potato farmer a pile of money and make it all better. You can’t do that with a 3-year-old boy, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try.