Okay, Chicago mom Shonita Roach suffocated her son Earwin Hemphill (make your own quip about their names, I haven’t got the heart,) underneath a mattress and a box-spring. (Those toddlers can be tough, you can’t be too careful.)
Sadly, I’m becoming somewhat desensitized to infanticides (deliberate or accidental) lately, and can’t seem to work up the necessary horror and revulsion to pitch a proper fit of bilious apostrophe in the mother’s direction. It’s too late, anyway.
However…
Can someone please take the precaution of sterilizing Assistant State’s Attorney Kathleen Lanahan, or taking any extant children into protective custody, before something unfortunate happens to them?
I find this matter-of-fact statement of hers very alarming:
Let’s review.[ul][li]Mother looks at her 1[sup]1/2[/sup]-year-old.[]1[sup]1/2[/sup]-year-old laughs.[]Mother beats child.[]Child cries.[]Mother continues to beat child.[/ul]Where the bloody blue fuck does a temper tantrum enter into this unsavoury scenario, you crack-addled pinhead? You’re a fucking prosecuting attorney, surely you’ve had some experience with thinking before you speak?[/li]
I’ll show you a temper tantrum, you fucking moron.
“I dunno, I just beat her about the head and shoulders with this pipe-wrench, and she launched into this unreasonable display of bad temper, crying and bleeding all over the place.”
Ugh. See, I’ve always kind of wanted to be a lawyer. I still have time enough to go to law school, but I can’t fathom being in a situation where I have to defend people like these. Assholes.
Bloody hell, if anything the prosecution should have been emphasising the normality of the infant’s behaviour and the completely off the wall response of the mother to perfectly normal toddler behaviour. What next? A prosecutor saying that a baby “provoked” a parent by crapping in its nappy?
Who in the hell is this woman’s supervisor? She needs a serious talking to about her role within the justice system.
Hey Larry, what the hell are you railing for? The ‘statement’ by Lanahan (if you read the article correctly) is just saying what Roach had allegedly said on the videotaped evidence. Lanahan is doing no more (or less) than giving a statement about what occured (acc. to Roach).
And of course, there is no ‘context’ in which to frame Lanahan’s sentiments here, so what the fuck are you on about? Why does Lanahan cop all your ire? I’m damn sure she said lots of other things, but just because they were not reported in this article you jump on her as (almost) equally culpable in the murder. WTF
A “tantrum” by definition, is a loud, possibly violent, fit of unreasonable anger.
kambuckta, she was not merely relating the accused statement, she was interpreting it, and doing such a sloppy job of it that it could give the impression of a woman driven to a desperate act by an uncontrollable child. The woman’s taped testimony does not say that the child was misbehaving. The child started crying after it was being hit. That’s not throwing a tantrum. Ms. Lanahan is not strengthening the state’s case by describing (accidentally or no) a scene in which the child is being a hellion immediately before his mother did him in. That is all.
Oh, she doesn’t. I just didn’t have the energy to put into them both, and there are no shortage of run-of-the-mill infanticide pittings lately.
**Larry Mudd **, I’ve read the article now FOUR times, and I *still * can’t understand why you are so pissed-off. Sure, the term ‘temper-tantrum’ can be translated as ‘unreasonable anger’ (which is obviously not the case with the child) however, this might just have been a poor choice of words without any intent on Lanahans part to minimise the culpability of the mother.
And I STILL don’t believe that (given the information in the article) she can be accused of applying a false interpretation of the incident.
I think Larry’s concern is somewhat similar to mine - it’s the kind of comment which had it been made by a prosecutor at a trial (rather than at a commital hearing) would have left the defence (who will no doubt be trying to prove this woman was pushed beyond endurance) with the opportunity to rebut with something along the lines of “even the prosecution has admitted that the child was throwing a tantrum” (and “temper tantrum” is a phrase to which every parent on a jury will relate).
It’s the kind of mistake a prosecutor shouldn’t make. In this specific instance it’s “no harm, no foul”, but it’s still very scary to think that someone responsible for prosecuting an alleged child-killer would make such a mistake in the first place.
Seriously, I’d like to know a little more about Ass’t State’s Attorney Lanahan.
The only other case with which I can find an online record of her involvement may have also been jeopardized by carelessness:
If she did say something as stupid (and patently untrue,) as that in order to elicit a statement from the young man, it nearly cost the State a successful prosecution for murder.
My beef with her is that she’s an attorney, and as such, she’s supposed to be trained to choose her words with care. If someone evades sentencing for something as serious as murder, I’d rather it be because the State didn’t have a solid case against them, rather than because someone on the prosecution side has a habit of touching toes to tonsils.
Larry Mudd, why do you say something is “by definition…loud, possibly violent, fit of unreasonable anger,” when the definition you supply says none of those things?
In fact, your definition made it seem as if a tantrum is something quite normal for a child to be doing. This would actually support the prosecution’s argument in that Roach reacted illogically to what children normally do.
Well, I grabbed a link to a definition after I had supplied my own definition, which is accurate. I think that most people understand what a tantrum is.
I think that it’s clear that the phrase carries a connotation that does not fit the child’s behaviour.
I must confess that I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. My concern is that the prosecutor, by her choice of words, inadvertantly introduced the idea of the child misbehaving in a way that can be very stressful to caregivers, when it seems that what actually occurred is that Ms. Roach starting hitting her child pretty much out of the blue. The kid was playing in his room, happy as a clam, laughing, and then wham momma’s opening a can of Toddler Whoop-ass. Crying when being beaten is not throwing a fit, it’s the expected reaction.
Lanahan should leave it to the defense to suggest that the scumbag was driven out of her wits by her kid’s bad behaviour. If both sides are suggesting that specious argument, it may actually sway some hare-brained jury.
Here we have a suggestion, right of the box, that the kid was throwing a tantrum. The suggestion apparenty originates with Ms. Lanahan, and it is somewhat counterproductive, since people may infer that Ms. Roach was reacting (however inappropriately,) to a stressful situation, instead of flying off the handle completely out of the blue.
Obviously, the “bad guy” in this case is Shonita Roach. You may think it’s trivial to jump down the throat of a lesser player in the drama for using the wrong word during a press conference. It’s just that this little bit of incompetence in high places may give the murdering freak a little bit of wiggle-room that she doesn’t deserve.
I don’t see a problem here. Prosecutors have to be very careful with their public statements. If she jumped out and down and denounced Roach and demanded that she be burned at the stake, she could be accused of misconduct by attempting to turn public opinion against the woman. She’s inflaming the public opinion.
She can save all her bile for the trial.
Besides, is a jury really going to say, “Hell, I have kids myself, and I’d like to throw a chest of drawers on the kid on top of the mattress and box spring.” I doubt it. Of course, juries are capable of doing any damn thing. But if the prosecutors are really out to crush this Roach, they should be able to do it.
As for that statement by Ross, all I see here is one word against another. Unless Lanahan has a habit of doing this, or someone else supports Ross’ story, I’ll keep my doubts about the veracity of this statement.
beagledave, I was trying to find out about that, and came up empty, but I did turn up some interesting, although unrelated pages. The Ohio Child Welfare Training Program has some oddness about it. They have a Roach on staff, and oddly enough, she doesn’t have the most unfortunate name: I believe that honour falls to Candy Barr. And if I were a “sexual abuse specialists” (sic), and my name were Sally Dine Fitch, I think I’d omit my middle-name to avoid the awkward spoonerism. This woman has the wrong name for her chosen profession:
Jim Still-Pepper’s name is only vaguely peculiar, but his CV raises eyebrows:
As for the OCWTP itself, listing THE USE OF A UNIVERSE OF COMPETENCIES on its “mission statement” doesn’t really do much for my expectations. It sounds like something that should be attributed to a superhero for underachievers. With lots of echo.
