Archive for the ‘Violence’ Category
Mother Gets Off With No Jail After Shaking Baby Girl to Death
Carisa Ashe, 34, reached a plea agreement with Atlanta prosecutors in February in which she will not serve a single day in jail for shaking her 5-week-old daughter to death in 1998.
The infant, Destiny, had been born premature and had been hospitalized for several weeks. Two days after going home, her mother shook the infant to death. Ashe told police that the baby simply stopped breathing.
Ashe, who has seven other children, had been charged with murder but reached an agreement to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter which carried a sentence of up to 20 years in jail. Instead, Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes ordered Ashe to serve five years probation and to have a tubal ligation within 3 months of her sentencing date to ensure she would have no more children.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard told Cox News Service that he agreed to the plea deal because Ashe was suffering from postpartum depression when she killed Destiny.
Source:
Mother chooses sterilization over murder trial. Beth Warren, Cox News Service, February 10, 2005.
Tags: Child Abuse, Georgia, United States
Villanova University Backs Down on Honoring Baby Killer
Villanova University found itself the focus of controversy in February over its plans to honor a professor who killed her 6-month old baby and then committed suicide in jail in August 2003.
Mine Ener had been a professor of history at Villanova and director of the school’s Center for Arab American Studies. In 2003 she gave birth to a baby girl who suffered from Down’s syndrome. According to police, Ener suffered from postpartum depression, for which she received medication, and did not want her daughter to “go through life suffering.”
So she slashed the baby’s throat. Later, while in jail awaiting 2nd degree murder charges, she killed herself by reportedly placing a plastic bag over her head and suffocating herself to death.
In 2004, a Villanova committee decided to honor Ener by creating the Mine Ener Memorial Study Space in the school’s Falvey Library. The space was designed to “commemorate Ener’s life and work” according to Villanova’s history department. A plaque was to be erected in the library, but before it could be put up, the national media got hold of the story.
The main problem with the plaque was that the university and Ener’s colleagues seemed to be skipping over the whole episode of Ener murdering her infant as if it was all but irrelevant. For example, here’s the text of the invitation that Villanova sent out for the ceremony at which the plaque was to be unveiled,
Villanova students are cordially invited to attend a brief ceremony to dedicate the Mine Ener Memorial in the Study Lounge on the first floor of Falvey Library, to take place on Thursday, January 20, at 9:30 am in the Library. Refreshments will be served.
A popular teacher and widely published specialist on the history of the modern Middle East, Dr. Ener joined the History Department faculty in 1996, and was associate professor and Director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies from 2002 until her death in August 2003.
The Memorial has been funded by donations from her many friends, family and colleagues to the Mine Ener Memorial Fund Committee, consisting of Rev. Kail C. Ellis, O.S.A., Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences;Dr. Barbara Wall, Special Assistant to the President for Mission Effectiveness; Dr. Adele Lindenmeyr, Professor and Chair of History; and Dr. Seth Koven, Associate Professor of History. The funds have been used to purchase furnishings for the new student lounge in the Library.
Many of the people who knew Ener defended the plaque claiming that the idea was to honor and remember the Ener they knew and worked with, not the person whose mental faculties progressively slipped to the point where she could murder her infant. As Dom Giordano told Cybercast News Service, however, the circumstances surrounding the murder and suicide certainly make sympathy toward her and her family understandable, but celebrating such a person is simply unacceptable.
In fact, Villanova University itself has taken the same stance in the past. In 1997, a major donor to Villanvoa — John du Pont — was convicted of the 1996 murder of Olympic wrestler David Schultz. Like Ener, du Pont was found guilty but mentally ill (he suffered from schizophrenia).
Did Villanova prefer to remember DuPont the way he was before his mental problems drove him to kill? Not exactly. Instead it quickly stripped his surname off of the basketball court/gymnasium which until then had been named after DuPont in gratitude for all the money he gave them.
And they were right. Despite what DuPont may or may not have been like before his mental illness drove him to murder, killing another human being is not just something you can cast off to the side over refreshments at a ceremony honoring someone.
Villanova eventually caved, and removed the plaque honoring Ener.
Sources:
Catholic University honors popular teacher who killed her baby. Kathleen Rhodes, CNSNews.Com, January 27, 2005.
Villanova Removes Plaque. WPVI.Com, January 31, 2005.
Silent reminders in Villanova halls. John Grogan, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 18, 2005.
Mom Kills Infant Daughter With Down Syndrome, Then Kills Self. Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express, September 3, 2003.
John du Pont Convicted of Murder. Ginny and John Dover, Schizophrenia.Com, 1997.
Slate’s Jack Shafer Demolishes Washington Post’s Alarmist Story on the Murder of Pregnant Women
The entire nation was shocked by reports earlier this month of the murder of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett. What made Stinnett’s murder particularly shocking was that she was strangled and her baby was then cut from her womb, allegedly by Lisa Montgomery who prosecutors say has admitted the crime.
Stinnett’s murder led the Washington Post’s Donna St. George to pen a three-part series, alarmingly titled “Many New or Expectant Mothers Die Violent Deaths.” The text of the three part series describes the circumstances of the murder of a number of women by boyfriends and husband or ex-es and suggests that such murders are relatively common. St. George writes, for example, that,
A year-long examination by The Washington Post of death-record data in states across the country documents the killings of 1,367 pregnant women and new mothers since 1990. This is only part of the national toll, because no reliable system is in place to track such cases.
St. George goes on to quote Texas Woman’s University’s Judith McFarlane as saying that the 1,367 pregnant women is likely just the tip of the iceberg,
That’s a formidable number — and that’s just the tip. You can’t address a problem that we don’t document. You can’t reduce them. You can’t prevent them. In essence, they don’t exist.
But you don’t have to read very far through the article to realize there are serious problems with it. St. George is typical of mainstream media accounts of amorphous problems in which she simultaneously asserts that little is known about the extent of the problem, but goes on to claim that it must nonetheless be a widespread phenomenon.
Slate’s Jack Shafer noticed the obvious problems and wrote a story for that online magazine criticizing St. George for engaging in such alarmist journalism without much of anything to back up her claims. Shafer writes,
Of course, just one maternal homicide is one more than acceptable, so I’m not arguing with the urgency of St. George’s topic. But she ignores available data that might place the horrific numbers she’s collected into relevant context. According to the Department of Justice, total murders of women in the United States peaked in 1993 at 5,550. The number of murders of women by “intimates”?defined by the government as a spouse, ex-spouse, or boyfriend?has also been falling since 1993 (when there were 1,581), reaching its lowest level since 1976 in 2001 and 2002 (which had 1,202 murders each year). These trends are all the more positive when you factor in the dramatic increase in the U.S. population since that time.
St. George briefly alludes to this good news in a sidebar to Part 1: Criminologist Neil Websdale of Northern Arizona University cautions her about overstating the maternal-homicide problem. More than 1,000 women are killed each year in domestic clashes, Websdale tells her, the overwhelming majority of whom are not pregnant. But she promptly drops the subject. Why? Does she fear that these statistics will undermine her thesis?
But there is a bigger, devastating problem with St. George’s claims about the murder of pregnant women, and it has to do with her careful parsing of the claim that she documented “the killings of 1,367 pregnant women and new mothers since 1990.” As Shafer writes (emphasis added),
The pivotal research in her piece is “Enhanced Surveillance for Pregnancy-Associated Mortality–Maryland, 1993-1998,” a 2001 study of 247 “pregnancy-associated” deaths in Maryland between 1993 and 1998 published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that “a pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause,” which St. George quotes favorably.
But the horror of this JAMA study recedes as you read it. We all know what a pregnant woman is: someone who’s carrying a baby. But what is a “recently pregnant” woman? The JAMA study defines the phrase very broadly. By its definition, mothers who give birth are recently pregnant for the 365 days following delivery. Women whose pregnancies end for any reason are also recently pregnant for 365 days after termination. So, a woman who had an abortion, miscarried, or gave birth to a baby would qualify for inclusion in this mortality study if she died with a year of that event.
In fact of the women in the JAMA study that St. George relies on, there were only 50 homicides among the 247 deaths, and only 23 of those occurred while the woman was pregnant. None of which St. George could be bothered to include in her report.
Similarly, St. George notes that in a Maryland study, “slightly more than 10 percent of all homicides among women ages 14 to 44 happened to a pregnant or postpartum woman in the past decade.” But as Shafer notes, some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that 10 percent of women 14 to 44 became pregnant during the same period of time, so its not exactly surprising that 10 percent of female victims of homicide happened to be pregnant at the time. Except, as Shafer notes, just like the JAMA study, the Maryland study also included women who were murdered after they gave birth, miscarried or had an abortion,
Because St. George’s group of Maryland murder victims includes postpartum women, this means the percentage of pregnant women murdered has got to be less than 10 percent. An unstated premise in St. George’s series is that the new findings refute the intuitive sense that pregnancy provides some protection from murder. But, examined closely, St. George’s reporting seems to support the idea that pregnant women are murdered less often than non-pregnant women.
Kudos to Shafer for such a thorough debunking of the Washington Post’s alarmism. Murders like that of pregnant women such as Stinnett or Laci Peterson are certainly horrifying, but they are horrifying in part because they are so rare. St. George’s attempt to imply that maternal murder may be on the rise is undermined by the very information sources she relies upon.
Sources:
Body Count: Doing the math on the Washington Post’s momicide series. Jack Shafer, Slate.Com, December 24, 2004.
The Muddled Maternal Murder Series: A Washington Post investigation loses its way. Jack Shafer, Slate.Com, December 20, 2004.
Many New or Expectant Mothers Die Violent Deaths. Donna St. George, Washington Post, December 19, 2004.
Hilariously Hypocritical Big Brother 2 Lawsuit
Krista Stegall, who was a contestant on “Big Brother 2″, has filed a lawsuit against CBS over the criteria it used to choose contestants.
In one episode another contestant, Justin Sebik, apparently put a knife to Stegall’s throat and ask if she would be mad if he killed her. He claimed he was joking(!) but CBS kicked him off the show.
Clearly she’s got a good civil lawsuit case against Sebik, but her case against CBS contains an oddity. Her lawyers maintain that since Sebik had prior arrests for assault that CBS never should have allowed him on the show. Stegall’s attorney, Clayton Burgess, told the Associated Press, “I don’t think there’s any doubt (CBS) made a huge mistake letting him in and keeping in him in.”
That certainly makes sense, but her lawyers forget to mention that this standard would also have kept Stegall herself off of the show. Stegall lied to the producer’s of the show by telling them she had never been arrested. In fact she was arrested on March 27, 2001, for simple battery after a 4 a.m. fight with her boyfriend.
The police report noted that both Stegall and the boyfriend had “physical marks” indicating that both had committed “battery on each other.”
Like Sebik, Stegall was never actually prosecuted. Stegall’s boyfriend told the prosecutor he wanted the charges dropped and the prosecutor declined to proceed with the case.
Sources:
‘Big Brother’ player sues over knife incident. The Associated Press, July 4, 2002.
The Smoking Gun (Krista Stegall).
Cathy Young on Disparities in Punishing Male and Female Killers
As usual, Cathy Young weighs in the July issue of Reason with an excellent examination of disparities in how male and female killers are treated by the American justice system.
Of particular interest is the fact that feminists almost never speak out about such disparities — in fact feminists have actively promoted the falsehood that a man who kills his partner receives only 2-6 years in jail on average compared to a woman who kills her partner who supposedly gets 15 to 20 years. In fact, as Young points out, studies find that men who kill their partners spend about 10 years longer in jail than do women who kill their partners.
As Young writes,
As a result, if a man commits a violent crime against a woman and gets off lightly, an outcry from women?s groups often follows. If it?s the other way round, the only vocal protests are likely to come from the victim?s family and from prosecutors.
The Working case [where a woman received a one day sentence for luring her estranged husband into an ambush and tried to murder him], like the Wagshall case, received minimal publicity. Imagine the reaction if a judge had said publicly that a man who had ambushed and shot his estranged wife should have been spared prison because he was depressed over the divorce.
Of course that would require a real commitment to sexual equality which, so far, many women’s groups are opposed to.
Source:
License to Kill
Men and women, crime and punishment. Cathy Young, Reason, July 2002.
Tags: Cathy Young
More on Infant Murder
Last week I wrote about a new study about the incredibly high risk that infants have of being murdered during their first year of life. Richard Bennett was the first to point out that the rate of infant murder turns out to be much higher than the murder rate of women.
In the CDC study of infant murders, the CDC found that from 1989 to 1998, infant murders occurred at a rate of 8.3 per 100,000 person years. By contrast, the incidence of single killer/single victim homicides where the victim was a woman was 1.35 per 100,000 in 1999.
But, of course, infant murder is not anywhere on the feminist agenda except in the 11 percent of cases where men are the perpetrators.
Source:
Variation in Homicide Risk During Infancy — United States, 1989–1998. Centers for Disease Control, March 8, 2002, 51(09);187-9.
NOW Continues to Defend Yates, Avoid the Real Issues
After trying to distance itself from the Andrea Yates trial, National Organization for Women was back in the spotlight after the jury’s verdict (which this writer wholeheartedly agreed with) as Deborah Bell defended Yates and attacked the jury in the case.
According to an Associated Press story shortly after the verdict was announced,
But Bell, president of the Texas chapter of the National Organization for Women, said she was stunned at the conviction in light of so much evidence of mental illness.
She said Yates was “persecuted, not prosecuted,” and the verdict unveiled a need for public education, understanding and compassion about mental illness.
Leave it to NOW to want a reeducation campaign to make Americans better understand a woman who murdered her vie children and repeatedly said she knew what she was doing was wrong.
Bell is correct, however, about the need for a public education campaign, but that campaign needs to be about child and infant murderers.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta released a report in early March noting that homicide was the 15th-leading cause of infant deaths in the United States. Children have a greater risk of being murdered during their first year of life than at anytime until they reach the age of 17.
Oddly enough, unlike Yates, murderers of infants rarely spend much time in jail. Typical of such killers is Melissa Drexler. On June 6, 1997, she gave birth to a baby boy in the ladies room of a catering hall where her high school prom was being held. She suffocated the newborn infant, threw the body in a trash can and returned to the prom. Drexler was released after serving just barely over 3 years in jail.
Such short sentences for killing infants are typical. Were the fathers of these infants responsible for the vast majority of them, you can be sure that NOW would have a special campaign to crack down on such a lenient court system. But the reality is that 89 percent of the known killers of infants under one year of age were females — usually the mother. Which, of course, means NOW and other groups are simply uninterested.
The jury that convicted Yates did an important service by sending the message that as a society we will not tolerate the murder of children. The next step is to have an equally strong response to people who murder the most vulnerable members of society, infants. A woman who suffocates her newborn son and then goes to the prom should not be able to walk out of prison after only two to three years.
Source:
CDC: First year of life a dangerous one. Associated Press, March 8, 2002.
Verdict sparks passionate reactions. Associated Press, March 12, 2002.
Tags: National Organization for Women
Are Men War Mongers?
Even when she temporarily strays away from animal rights ever so slightly, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals chief ignoramus Ingrid Newkirk still manages to spread falsehoods and nonsense wherever she goes. This week, Bruce Friedrich posted an article by Newkirk, “Violence at home,” to an animal rights news list. Within the first three paragraphs, Newkirk manages to make three demonstrably false claims about violence and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States.
Newkirk opens her article by writing,
Is it a conicidence that, in the wake of the attacks on Washington and New York, most men speak of retaliation while most women express an urge to return to peace?
No, Ingrid, it is not a coincidence, its a complete falsehood. Zogby International interviewed 1,018 likely voters September 14-16, asking them, “Would you support or oppose an all-out war against countries which harbor or aid terrorists?”
Of those polled, 78.9 percent of men and 71.0 percent of women said they would support such an all-out war. When asked, “Do you agree or disagree that such a war would be worht it even if it involved substnatial American casualties?” 77.0 percent of men said they agree,d while 64.8 percent of women did as well.
The number of men and women who outright oppose such a war on terrorism are almost identical. Only 16.1 percent of men said they opposed an all-out war on terrorism, while 18.7 percent of women said they opposed such a war.
Apparently when Newkirk writes that “most women express an urge to return to peace,” she’s talking about her and her 5 closest friends, rather than the general female population of the United States.
Newkirk then goes on to describe a speech by Colman McCarthy. Newkirk writes,
At the Washington Center for Teach Peace, Professor Colman McCarthy has fretted over the fact that, year after year, his female studnets are always more open than his male students to the concept of peace. A Georgetown law student thought she had the answer. “Women want to know about nonviolence more than men because we are more victimized by violence than men. And, victims always want solutions quicker.”
This is pure nonsense. Aside from rapes that occur outside of prison, the overwhelming victims of violent acts are men. The risk of being the victim of an assault, murder or other act of violence is much higher for men than it is for women.
Finally, Newkirk repeats an oft-repeated but completely fake factoid.
The leading cause of injury to women is being beatne at home. Some women have more fear walking into their homes than walking out of them.
This claim is one of those factoids that appears commonly in domestic violence literature, almost always, as in Newkirk’s case, unattributed. This is because both Justice Department and Centers for Disease Control studies suggest that about 1 percent of women’s injuries are caused by their male partners.
Source:
Violence at home. Ingrid Newkirk, September 21, 2001.
When a Mother Kills
Donna Laframboise wrote a perceptive article about the way violence by women is perceived differently than violence by men.
Laframboise notes that last summer there were two prominent Canadian domestic violence cases. In one instance a man from Pickering, Ontario, murdered his estranged wife and then killed himself, while in the otehr a man from Kitchener, Ontario killed his four children and his wife before killing himself.
This year, however, the Andrea Yates case is of course occupying the media, as is a Toronto case where police recently charged a woman with killing here two kids and then attempting to kill herself. But the public reaction is a bit different from the reaction to the male killers. According to Laframboise,
Radio station phone lines aren’t lighting up with people condemning anti-domestic-violence programs as inadequate. Governments, police and the courts aren’t being accused of doing too little to protect the vulnerable. No one is asking how many more innocent children have to die before these offences receive proper attention. The term “child abuse” is also noticeably absent from the discussion. We aren’t being inundated with statistics telling us how many children are killed by their parents — particularly mothers — each year.
Laframboise thinks the reason is that people are so used to hearing about violence against women that they immediately “slot” stories where women are the victims into that category, while the corresponding lack of publicity about violence where women are the perpetrators makes people see it as the exception to the rule (which perhaps explains why commentators often say they cannot imagine why a woman would kill her children, but rarely do such questions arrise when fathers kill their offspring).
Source:
Domestic violence isn’t a gender issue. Donna Laframboise, National Post, July 18, 2001.
Tags: Donna Laframboise
South Carolina’s Home Invasion Policy
South Carolina’s Attorney General, Charlie Condon, has made national headlines for leading his state’s controversial anti-abortion efforts. Condon’s actions have made him enemy number one among some feminists. In January, however, Condon announced a new policy that should help women (and in fact already has in one case), and yet the media is raking him over the coals for it.
After hearing several reports of home invasions in South Carolina, Condon announced that the state would not prosecute individuals who killed intruders in their home. At the time Condon said,
The message needs to be sent loudly and clearly that the state is going to back the homeowner if their home is invaded. I’m putting home invaders on notice that if an occupant chooses to use deadly force, there will be no prosecution.
Apparently many in South Carolina thought Condon’s statement was a gimmick for public consumption — Condon made his announcement less than two weeks before beginning his campaign for Governor. But then a woman in South Carolina killed her boyfriend, and Condon stayed true to his word.
The case seems pretty straightforward. On February 17, Lisa Gant, 36, had an argument with the father of her child, William Brock, Jr., 39. Brock lived about 20 miles from Gant, but occasionally stayed at her house and had clothes and other possession in her apartment. Gant told police she argued with Brock and that he slapped her and put her in a headlock after she told him she wanted to end their relationship. She managed to get Brock to leave the apartment, slamming the door behind him and locking it.
Brock then proceeded to break down the locked door. When Brock entered the kitchen, Gant stabbed him in the chest with a filet knife. Brock staggered out to his car, and was found dead by police who arrived shortly thereafter.
Should Gant face prosecution?
Condon said no, and essentially ordered prosecutors, who had charged Gant with murder, to drop all charges. Local prosecutors and police would have preferred to place Gant on trial and let a judge and jury sort out whether or not she committed justifiable homicide.
In the absence of any evidence that Gant was untruthful about the events that transpired on February 17, 2001, what could possibly be served by putting her on trial. What is the point of asserting that people have a right to defend themselves only to put them before a jury to decide if Gant was really scared when her boyfriend broke down her door to get at her?
Condon nicely summed up the problem with viewing Gant and others like her as criminals who have to undergo an expensive trial to assert their right to defend themselves from intruders in their own homes,
You don’t want to put the homeowner in the position of saying, ‘If I use deadly force, I might be cleared after a trial.’ That’s tantamount to saying that people have rights, but there’s a huge cross attached to it. Most courts have a laissez-faire attitude about these things, figuring that everything will come out fine after a trial. But I think we need to send the messages that the home is sacred ground, period.
Source:
Home-invasion policy ignites South Carolina. David Firestone, The New York Times, March 16, 2001.