Hey, NutWrench got it! 
Larry Mudd, two points.
First, you assume that Ms. Lanahan “intepreted” Roach’s confession. The article does not provide a transcription of Roach’s confession. For all you know, Roach said that her child had a temper tantrum.
Second, for reasons I cannot comprehend, you have decided that the child did not have a temper tantrum. You’ve decided Roach hit her child “pretty much out of the blue.” The only scenario we have (because again we haven’t read the transcript of the confession) is the one Ms. Lanahan provided. And she said that Roach testified that the child had a tantrum. Why do you assume without evidence that Ms. Lanahan is lying?
Third, even if Ms. Lanahan came up with the phrase by herself, so the fuck what?
Put your mind at ease. Even if the child was tearing up the apartment, his conduct does not raise a defense for Roach.
“My three year old was acting so bad, I had to kill him,” is - trust me - not going to be the basis for an acquittal, or even a reduction in sentence. Face it, if that woman in Texas couldn’t get off when she killed her kids, Roach ain’t.
Reprise:
A tantrum is “perfectly normal toddler behaviour.” That’s kind of the point here. In fact, I can see this as the perfect closing argument by the prosecutor.
“All Ms. Roach can say in her defense is that her three year old child had a temper tantrum.
A temper tantrum.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that, if a temper tantrum by a three year old is sufficient justification for murder, none of us would be in this court room today.
A woman, a mother, who thinks that a three year old child deserves death for acting like a three year old should never be allowed on the streets again.”
Sua
Sua got it, not NutWrench. Toddlers throw tantrums. Adults, particularly the parents of said toddlers, are not supposed to react negatively to those tantrums. They certainly are not supposed to kill a child because he throws a tantrum.
Lanahan could’ve just as easily said “She went to see what he was doing and he ate a donut instead of listening to her, so she hit him,” Lanahan said. “He grabbed a nerf bat and smashed up everything in his room, then went to the kitchen, grabbed the peanut butter and jelly off of the counter and smeared them all over the floors and walls, then tied every pair of shoes in the house to the cat’s tail and then he stood on top of the glass coffee table and danced a jig while loudly singing The Song That Doesn’t End and proclaiming himself to be the king of dookie then he turned the stereo on, tuned it to the all klezmer station and cranked the volume all the way up, so she hit him again.”
The problem here is not what the boy did, or how it is characterized by the prosecutor. The problem is that the mother repeatedly hit her son, apparently by her own admission, for doing the things that toddlers do, for laughing at her, for crying when he was hit, for having the mind and behavior of a child. The woman has admitted to responding to normal acts by the boy with inappropriate violent outbursts. She’s set the stage for her own conviction by admitting to being dangerous and over-the-top with the child. If anything, Lanahan’s words make that even more clear.
By the way, am I the only one who could envision (and perhaps it’s just because I’m watching Law & Order Crime & Punishment as I type this) Lanahan making unreported “air quotes” when she said the words “temper tantrum?”
I’m assuming that the kid wasn’t having a tantrum because it was stated that Roach called him from another room, got no response, entered the room he was in, whereupon the child laughed, which is what prompted Roach to strike him. It was at this point that the phrase “temper tantrum” comes into play.
Many parents have permanently injured their children by shaking them when they won’t stop crying – many more have not been sentenced, for it, because it was determined that they weren’t in their right mind, due to stress and exhaustion, and they did the wrong thing in response to their infant’s incessant crying. Accident. Stupidity. Whatever. It’s quite a different story if someone just picks up a smiling baby and shakes them until their neck snaps, though. Note that defense lawyers are not required to demonstrate that shaking a baby is an appropriate thing to do, they only have to suggest some mitigating circumstances.
The reason that I assume that Lanahan is responsible for the phrasing: “She went to see what he was doing and he laughed at her, so she hit him,” Lanahan said. “He threw a temper tantrum, so she hit him again.” is that it is clear that Lanahan is offering a reconstruction of events, based on Roach’s statement, and not a verbatim relation of Roach’s statement. Do I seriously think that this mistep is going to have an effect on the outcome of the trial? No. Am I concerned that someone who is capable of saying something so manifestly stupid is working on the prosecution of this case? You betcha.
Yes, I think Lanahan’s description subtley influences people’s perceptions of what happened. Hell, even Jeff Coen, the Tribune reporter who relayed that story, picked up the ball and ran with it: He opens with “When toddler Earwin Hemphill wouldn’t stop crying in his mother’s South Side apartment last weekend, authorities allege his mother pushed a box spring and mattress onto him and then went out to make phone calls, pinning and suffocating the child.” A careless reader may assume that the kid’s crying was the starting-point for the chain of events, rather than the blow which started him crying.
I don’t get the L&A ref, but “air quotes” would be appropriate and would certainly change everything. Now I have an image of Lanahan with a shaved head in a grey jumpsuit though. Kinda sexy, actually.
What the hell happened there? My responses disappeared.
Anyway, to sum up. Larry when you talk about the “shaking baby” cases, you misunderstand mitigating circumstances. Parents can get be charged with lesser crimes or not sentenced in such cases because they did not reasonably foresee that the shaking would lead to injury/death. They did not get reduced sentences/let off because the child was having a temper tantrum. The mitigation is due to the unexpected result of the parent’s action, not because of the nature of the provocation that led to the parent’s action. Had the kid been sleeping soundly when the parent shook him/her, resulting in injury, the result would have been the same.
Do you have access to the transcript of the confession? No. There is nothing “clear” about it. For all you know, Lanahan was reading the confession transcript verbatim For all you know, Roach used the phrase “temper tantrum.”
You are impugning Ms. Lanahan based on only the information Lanahan provided. She said the child had a temper tantrum. How the hell do you know that the child didn’t have a temper tantrum.
You admit that the phrase will have no effect on the trial. Personally, I think the phrase helps the prosecution, because every sane person in the world realizes that (a) toddlers have temper tantrums and (b) parents aren’t supposed to kill their kids for having them. Use of the phrase demonstrates how horrific Roach’s response was to normal behavior by the child.
As for as I can tell, the only injury here is that you don’t like the phrase. And for that, Ms. Lanahan should be sterlized? Wow.
Sua
What SuaSponte said, both times.
With the added caveat that I still have a bit of faith in the jury system.
Any juror who would allow Mama Roach to walk, or receive a reduced sentence, because they thought to themselves “Roach Jr. was having a tantrum, so his mother suffocated him under a mattress and box spring. Seems OK to me, after all, the prosecution didn’t seem all that upset about it” is a juror who should be drowned in his own excrement. But I can’t see how the prosecution needs any of the blame based on anything I have read here or in the posted article.
Maybe because I can’t think of anything a three-year-old can do that would warrant being smothered, for heaven’s sake. How could even a genuinely irresponsible statement by the ADA change that? Even in a nation that gave us the OJ verdict?
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks for the back-up, Shodan. I like you more and more every day.
Larry, I just thought of another factor for consideration. It is in the best interests of the prosecution for a prosecutor, pre-trial, to be as dispassionate as possible and draw extremely few inferences against the defendant, when talking to the press.
The prosecutor does not want to leave open any avenue for the defense attorneys to assert that the potential jury pool has been tainted and to demand a change of venue. Not only do change of venues greatly delay trials, they can also lead to bizarre results (remember Simi Valley?)
Ms. Lanahan probably went through training to teach her to talk in a press conference the way she talked.
Sua
Keep reading me, Sua - I am sure you can find something offensive that I wrote if you just try. 
It just keeps getting more and more difficult to distinguish between Jerry Springer and real life every day.
As my mother-in-law is wont to observe, “Oh, the things you see when you don’t have a gun.”
Regards,
Shodan
Jesus, if you want to see temper tantrums, you should have seen me as a child.
I once threw a three hour sobbing and crying and screaming fit because I wanted my mom to go and buy me a doll. Her response? Walk out of the room and let me cry myself until I was hoarse and tired. Not fun.
Please. So WHAT if the kid threw a tantrum. Didn’t you throw them as children?
That bit of hyperbole was over-the-top, admitted. I’m going to slowly back away from argueing that there’s a slim chance Lanahan is aiding the defence, until we have some more details.
Really, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It is the phrase that I object to, period.
This is what has set me off. If a child starts crying after they are struck, it’s not a temper tantrum. Anyone who can read that sentence, and think that the child was pitching a fit, has very poor reading comprehension abilities, IMHO. It boggles my mind that a supposedly intelligent person would utter it, and I would question whether or not they might make a suitable parent.
Granted, with the paucity of information made available to us so far, it can not be determined precisely what led to that choice of words. My assumption is that Roach described the scenario more accurately, and Lanahan equates “crying uncontrollably” with “throwing a tantrum”, regardless of the circumstances. Even if Roach did say, “I hit him, and then he had a temper-tantum,” in the interest of clarity, Lanahan ought not to have relayed that as “She hit him, and he threw a temper-tantrum.”
I do think that it can colour people’s perceptions of what actually transpired. The fact is, (as Lanahan stated,) that the child was laughing immediately before the attack began. Anyone who has had to deal with a child who is throwing a tantrum knows what a trying experience it can be, and how helpless you may feel. Obviously, it’s no justification for any form of child abuse, let alone murder, but I’m sure plenty of parents might think “There, but for the Grace of Spock…”
These folks at epinions have plenty of good advice about how to deal with temper tantrums, (none of which suggests piling furniture on top of the child, so far as I could tell,) but a common refrain is “How do I avoid being driven out of my mind?” If you think that that’s purely figurative, you’ve never been a caregiver.
What offended me the most, (and I know I’m being redundant here,) is that the phrasing created a faint suggestion, (which has been picked up on,) that it was somehow the 1-year-old’s behaviour that pushed the woman over the edge into insanity.
She’s just plain evil, and I don’t know whether I would find the hypothetical Christian hell or the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation more comforting with regard to her punishment.
But if she cops an insanity plea or gets off with anger-managment or substance-abuse counselling or some such thing, I’ll be real miffed, y’hear?
But you see, that’s an assumption too. You’re assuming “hit” meant “whalloped.” Many was the time in my toddlerhood that my ma or pa would slap the back of my hand or give me a quick swat on the butt, and I would respond with a full-blown hissy-fit. Not because I was in pain. Instead, I was pissed at my parents (and usually not for the slap or the swat, but instead because they had stopped me from doing whatever it was I was doing).
Sua