Husband Protests Video Showing Alert Terri
Terri's father, Robert Schindler, admitted the tape was made surreptitiously Aug. 11, 2001, in violation of a court order by Pinellas-Pasco County, Fla., Circuit Judge George Greer. The video, which shows Terri laughing and trying to speak, also indicates attempts at rehabilitative therapy, also banned by the court. But Schindler says he is willing to risk jail because of his conviction that anyone who watches the tape will realize his daughter is not in the comatose condition her husband Michael Schiavo and his attorneys portray.
Prosecutors to Seek Death for
Couple Charged in Boy's Death
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a couple charged with fatally beating a 7-year-old boy and collecting welfare for the child during the 17 months that his body went undiscovered. Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico said his office would seek to have the victim's mother, Ann J. Daw, 31, and her boyfriend, Vincent V. Huntley, 41, tried together for Onyx Daw's death.
Alaska's Abortion Consent Law Rejected
ANCHORAGE - A Superior Court judge has struck down as unconstitutional a state law that requires minors seeking an abortion to get consent from a parent or judge. Monday's ruling by Anchorage Superior Court Judge Sen Tan drew criticism from Alaska's lieutenant governor. The law requires unmarried girls younger than 17 to get a parent's or judge's permission to have an abortion. The law has been on hold since 1997 pending the outcome of the lawsuit of Planned Parenthood of Alaska against the state. Kevin Clarkson, the Anchorage attorney who defended the statute at the trial in January, said he expects the state will appeal Tan's ruling to the Alaska Supreme Court. (Read: Christians Murdering Babies)
$5.8 Million Verdict Reached In
Pregnant Woman's Wrongful-Death Suit
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The mother of a woman gunned down while carrying the baby of former Carolina Panther Rae Carruth believes she will eventually see some or all of the $5.8 million she has won in a wrongful death lawsuit. Carruth and the co-defendants were ordered Wednesday to pay about $5.8 million in damages to Adams' estate.
Cherica Adams was eight months pregnant with Carruth's child when she was shot in November 1999. Mecklenburg Superior Court Judge Yvonne Mims Evans awarded Adams' mother, Saundra Adams, all the monetary damages sought in the wrongful death lawsuit against Carruth and the three other men responsible for the fatal shooting. All four were found guilty in 2001 of conspiring in the Nov. 16, 1999 shooting. Cherica Adams died about a month later; the baby, named Chancellor, survived but has cerebral palsy.
Florida Jury Indicts N.C. Woman
in Baby's Death at Key West Hotel
An Asheville woman was indicted for manslaughter in the death of her newborn infant in a Florida hotel room last May. Key West police said yesterday that a Monroe County, Fla., jury charged Sarah Lynn Bleckley, 23, with the second-degree felony. According to police, Bleckley and her boyfriend, Joshua Allen Mayhew, 25, of Winston-Salem were on vacation May 18 when Bleckley gave birth to a baby girl in their hotel room. A security guard at the Radisson Hotel discovered the baby's remains in a breezeway at 6 a.m. She was discarded in a plastic bag with blood-soaked towels. The umbilical cord and placenta were still attached to the baby's body, police said. An autopsy later revealed that the baby died of probable asphyxia.
Truck Carries Graphic Pro-Life Message Through Metro
After driving through Kansas City, a very large truck with very controversial pictures on it will be heading to another Kansas town.
Bill Calvin, with the Center for Bioethical Reform, is driving a truck across country as part of what the group calls a "Reproductive Choice Tour." The truck is plastered with graphic photographs of an aborted babies.
Bush Pumps Up Crowds as He
Prepares to Meet Governor-Elect
President Bush swept through California on Wednesday in advance of his first meeting today with the state's governor-elect, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose victory the White House hopes might signal a Republican resurgence in the state. Bush will meet with Schwarzenegger privately in Riverside, then publicly when the president delivers a speech in San Bernardino. A potential problem for Bush is that Schwarzenegger, like many Hollywood Republicans, tends to be moderate or liberal on hot-button social issues, such as abortion rights and gay rights.[?] (Abortion and Sodomites are NO problem at for GW: Bush in Bed with Homosexuals; Bush Betrayed Pro-Lifers Again)
RU-486 Critics Counter Claims About Abortion Drug
Nearly a month after the death of a California woman who took RU-486, pro-life groups are touting new evidence about the abortion drug in their quest to have it pulled from the market. Three pro-life organizations say they have bolstered the legal and scientific arguments against RU-486 in a new filing with the Food and Drug Administration, which approved the drug in September 2000.
Man Charged With Abuse Of A Corpse,
Baby was found in a trash receptacle
A 37-year-old man was in custody Wednesday, accused of placing a newborn infant in a trash receptacle at a Beeville cemetery. Bee County sheriff's deputies arrested Panchito Espinoza Tuesday night and charged him with abuse of a corpse in relation to the incident. The charge is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by two years in prison and a $4,000 fine. The infant's 27-year-old mother went to the hospital Sunday where it was determined that she had given birth around midnight Saturday or early Sunday morning. The baby's body was found wrapped in tissue and a plastic bag in a trash bin at Our Lady of Victory cemetery.
Man Charged With Killing Infant Son
Baby, 5 Weeks Old, May Have Been Shaken To Death
JACKSON, Miss. -- A Jackson man has been charged with murder in the death of a 5-week-old baby. Police arrested Latroy Clay, 18, Tuesday night. Investigators suspect Clay shook to death his infant son sometime around Sept. 17, after his ex-girlfriend dropped the baby off at his house. Clay lived with his aunt, who told WAPT 16 News Wednesday that there's no way he could be capable of killing his son. Clay's friend, Tanja Hart, agreed.
Man Pleads Guilty to Vehicular Assault Charge
A Seattle man who caused an accident that forced an 8-month pregnant woman to undergo an emergency Caesarean birth pleaded guilty this week to vehicular assault. Fred Leroy Culp, 47, of Seattle, had been drinking the morning of July 30, according to court documents, when he rear-ended a van on Denny Way and then careened into oncoming traffic, hitting head-on a car driven by Consonya Bell Taylor. After the accident, the unborn child began showing signs of distress in the womb because of the heavy narcotics needed to stabilize Taylor. When the baby's heart rate began to drop, doctors performed a Caesarean section. The 5 pounds, 5 ounces baby boy was nicknamed Miracle by his father who said he came through unscathed.
Authorities Investigate Infant's Death
HONOLULU -- The Honolulu medical examiner is holding off on the cause of death of a 10-month-old girl found dead in a car. The baby was found unresponsive after spending more than an hour in the heat of her mother's parked car. The baby was left in a car that was parked in the parking lot of the YMCA in Kailua. The baby's mother found the child unresponsive. She rushed her daughter inside the facility.
Evidence Handling Defended in Peterson Case
Prosecutors contend a single hair found attached to pliers in Scott Peterson's boat broke in an evidence package and was not mishandled by investigators, according to documents filed in court Tuesday.
The hair could be a key piece of physical evidence linking Peterson's pregnant wife to the boat he said he took fishing Christmas Eve, the day she was reported missing. The hair is part of a collection of evidence the defense is seeking to bar from court, including information from scent-tracking dogs, GPS tracking devices, wiretaps and a hypnotized witness.
Judge says Nichols trial in Jeopardy
OKLAHOMA CITY - The state murder trial for Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols will continue, despite serious concerns raised by the judge in the case that the federal government is jeopardizing Nichols' right to a fair trial. During a hearing Monday in a basement courtroom at the Oklahoma County Jail, Judge Steven Taylor, of McAlester, said the federal government's resistance to allowing defense interviews of former federal investigators is hampering efforts to proceed with the trial. That resistance, coupled with the state's decision to end a preliminary hearing in the case, is creating a "perfect storm" that could prevent the case from going to trial.
Ethics for Communists?
Bid to Tighten Bio-Ethical
Standards in Communist China
Pacific Rim Bureau -- Efforts are underway to counter an apparent "anything goes" approach to bio-ethical research in China, according to a Western ethics expert who recently visited the country. The existing system of ethical review of research was "very inadequate," said Prof. Donald Evans, head of the Bioethics Research Centre at New Zealand's University of Otago, but added that he believed that "there is a will" to improve it. Evans was speaking after it was announced that U.S. and Chinese researchers, working in China, had created a pregnancy using eggs from two women and sperm from one man. The doctors used a technique devised in the U.S. but which had not been successful there by the time it was outlawed in the late 1990s.
Of three healthy embryos, one was aborted to give the other two a better chance to survive, but both babies later died, at 24 weeks and 29 weeks gestation, respectively.
N.C. Judges Balk At Rules Change
Many of North Carolina's frontline trial judges are revolting against a change in rules that allows state judicial candidates to behave more like other politicians. Their beef: The new rules threaten to turn impartial judges into vote mongers. Under the new rules, legal scholars argue, judicial candidates could promise voters not to overturn death sentences, to ban abortions, to defy gun ownership rights or to pledge to act in any manner on any issue that might come before them.