Category: Law

Thanks to a comment by reader Amber, I’ve learned that Andrea Yates has been found not guilty of murdering the five children she drowned in Texas some five years back:

A Harris County jury has found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity during her second capital murder trial for the drowning deaths of her children in the family’s bathtub in 2001.

The verdict upholding Yates’ insanity defense comes after the jury deliberated more than 12 hours over three days. Yates appeared shocked and sat staring wide-eyed with her lips slightly parted as State District Judge Belinda Hill asked each juror individually shortly after noon today whether they agreed with the verdict.

There’s no question that she did it, of course, but she was clearly nuts and off her meds at the time. This verdict is as much a miscarriage of justice as the guilty verdict in the original trial was. John Cole suggested we need a “guilty but insane” verdict in cases like this, and I suppose that’s right.

I went to the same high school as Yates, where we were both on the swimming team (at different times.) The news article doesn’t mention that she’s a fundamentalist Christian, which probably figured into her mental state in a significant way.

I rather doubt that a father who did something like this would have elicited as much sympathy.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the so-called Family Scholars Blog are all upset over Georgia’s attempt to correct inequities in its child support guideline. The AJC says it’s going to make children live on mac and cheese, and the Family Scholars see equally grim consequences:

The “second family” who actually has the dad in the home still typically gets a lot more than the “first” family kids who don’t live with him. And of course the dad bears some responsibility for bearing new children if he did not feel he could adequately care for them. So while I’m sympathetic to the needs of the second family children, it’s also the case that their parents are married and they are benefitting in tangible and intangible ways from that situation, while too often the kids of a father’s earlier marriage suffer a dramatic drop in family income, social capital, and family connectedness that the states, even if they wanted to, could not fully rectify.

The AJC editorial that FS quotes pushes the stereotype that divorce is about men running off and leaving their families. Once this is cemented in the reader’s mind, he’s going to be sympathetic to hanging dad out to dry. Of course, anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of divorce knows that this stereotype is false; the vast majority of divorces are chosen by women, typically for very flimsy reasons.

Family Scholar Marquardt claims: The “second family” who actually has the dad in the home still typically gets a lot more than the “first” family kids who don’t live with him., also incorrect. While child support guidelines are state law and vary wildly across the country, the norm removes an enormous amount of money from the father’s household and, when tax consequences are taken into account, leaves him in a poorer financial position than the mother’s household. (even Peterson’s full review of the Weitzman data showed that, and guidelines are much higher now than they were then.) As children still need to spend time with their fathers, costs of maintaining the less-custodial household aren’t substantially less than those of the more-custodial household.

And then you have the double standard problem: married parents are simply required by law to provide their children with the basics of food, clothing, medical care, and shelter, while divorced fathers are required to go beyond that and provide a certain lifestyle to both the children and the mother. This is a constitutional problem.

And then you have the problem of incorrectly characterizing support for the mother as “child support” rather than alimony. The problem here is that alimony is taxable for the recipient but child support to the payer. If these stay-at-home divorced moms have no income except what their ex-husbands pay them, it’s much more tax-efficient to the family as a whole to characterize the support as alimony, and much more honest.

Second families aren’t a new issue in the discussion about divorce laws; they’ve been a major part of the dialog since at least the mid-90s. Men tend to get re-married faster than women, and there’s no law or public policy objective that says men are better off single. Even David Blankenhorn, no friend to fathers, says men need the “civilizing influence of marriage” Does that principle apply any less to divorced men than to never-married ones? (Family Scholars is Blankenhorn’s blog.)

The bottom line is that women who want to be stay-at-home moms are better off married than divorced, which is simply common sense to anybody but the Family Scholars and their comrades across the political divide, the anti-father feminists.

Julie Batson’s Op-Ed in the AJC is a reasonable analysis of the Georgia situation:

Public and elected officials have recognized what judges have been slow to recognize — the current guidelines are blatantly unfair and have no basis in economic reality.

With the adoption of the new tables and the clarifications to the statute, Georgia will finally be in line with all of the other states in the Southeast and most of the nation regarding how child support is calculated.

There has been a lot of heated debate regarding the parenting time adjustments included in the bill. If Georgia wants to encourage fathers to be involved in their children’s lives, then fathers need to be able to afford to spend time with their children.

Under the current system, many fathers simply could not afford to spend time with their children after paying the monthly child support amount they had been ordered to pay. Many had to pay child support amounts as if they never exercised visitation, let alone had joint physical custody.

Family Scholars would do well to consider her argument.

I’m opposed to the death penalty and have been for quite some time. While there are several good reasons to oppose the death penalty, the one that I find most compelling is the sloppiness of the criminal justice system. Eye-witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate, and it’s the gold standard of evidence, and physical evidence is too frequently inconclusive with respect to the link between the crime and the accused. We may know that a certain gun fired the bullet that killed someone, but we rarely have certainty that person X fired that gun, let alone what his motivation may have been. So a small element of doubt remains in most death penalty convictions, and that’s enough for me to oppose a punishment that forecloses the discovery and the correction of errors that may have been made in the trial. This is a slim reed in an era in which every death penalty conviction is appealed and appealed for one or two decades, of course, and a non-existent objection in cases in which the evidence is clear and overwhelming.

But my experience is that I become more and more willing to accept the death penalty every time the celebrities leave their gated mansions to lecture the rest of us on morality. Bianca Jagger, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hayden, and Jesse Jackson have nothing to teach us about morality.

Jagger’s only achievement in this life was to marry Mick Jagger for a brief time, and Hayden has a similar resume as the most expensive ex-husband of Jane Fonda and former occupant of the most expensive seat in the California Assembly. Sarandon named a child after Jack Henry Abbott, the brutal killer who murdered a waiter just six weeks after Norman Mailer and a host of other celebrities secured his release from prison on a prior murder. And Jesse Jackson is simply a shake-down artist, a philanderer, and an opportunist.

Hayden argued that Tookie Williams should have been pardoned because he was part of a revolutionary vanguard that threatened to bring down capitalism presumably because it was an impediment to dealing drugs, and the Religious Left made all sorts of incoherent and self-righteous arguments about God’s mercy, redemption, and social science. This tradition goes back to Gandhi’s notoriously false assertion that “an eye for an eye makes us all blind.” I’m not blind and neither are you.

The death penalty does exactly nothing to prevent redemption, salvation, or conversion. We all die, and the only difference between death row inmates and the rest of us is that they know when, where, and how it’s going to happen. If redemption is in the cards, they know the schedule and have a leg up on the rest of us. And if religious conversion is driven strictly by God, the timetable is absolutely unimportant.

We have the death penalty because most of us believe that some crimes are so horrible that it’s inconceivable that their perpetrators should be allowed to live and breath the same air as the rest of us. We can all conceive of some crime so horrible that it should qualify: Hitler’s gassing of millions, the rape and torture of a bus load of school children, the negligent drowning of sex worker, or the execution of a twelve-year-old child by a shotgun blast to the face after she’s been made to watch the killing of her mother and father, Tookie’s crime. So the death penalty is here to stay.

If Hollywood’s activists have so much time on their hands that they have no choice but to lecture us on the death penalty (between their divorces and trips to rehab), it would certainly be a lot more palatable if they could find a more suitable poster child than Tookie Williams. Their support of such a monster makes them look downright dim.