Dixies case: Ball was dropped again and again
By REKHA BASU
Register Columnist
10/29/2003
Dixie Shanahan is charged with a shocking crime, made more so by over a year of elaborate cover-ups: Shocking that a mother of three may have put a gun to her husband's head. Shocking that his remains were left in a bedroom of their house to quietly decompose. And shocking that Scott Shanahan's life apparently meant so little to anyone that his disappearance triggered only disinterested speculation around their hometown of Defiance.
But most shocking is that for all of Dixie Shanahan's known suffering and desperate pleas for help, nothing and no one could put a stop to it until she allegedly did so herself.
The system failed Dixie Shanahan. Now it will put her on trial for perhaps taking matters into her own hands.
There's little question that Scott Shanahan brutally abused and controlled his wife. Police had ample evidence that he beat her with objects, even when she was pregnant, threatened her life, held her captive in the basement, her hands bound with hanger wire, and locked her in a closet with the children, once even in sheriff's deputies' presence.
Yet the worst thing that ever happened to Scott was four days in jail and a $1,000 fine.
He was actually convicted twice. He had two restraining orders issued against him, and two other criminal charges filed but dropped. There was also probation, and mandatory batterers' education. None of which stopped Scott the way hard time in prison might have.
That could have been ordered, but wasn't, thanks to sentences being suspended. Instead of doing a month in jail for his first conviction, he did two days. Instead of two years for the second, he did four days.
After police went to the Shanahan house in October 2000 and saw Scott had locked Dixie and the children in a bedroom closet, he could have been prosecuted for false imprison- ment and domestic abuse. At that point, because of the pileup of offenses, both the category of crime and penalties would have been elevated. An offender is allowed two deferred judgments.
But charges were dropped after Dixie wrote the judge asking that they be.
The justice system did follow policy in the first two cases, and got convictions. Then, it dropped the ball at just the point where it should have gotten tough.
Deferred judgments are common practice. But some advocates for battered women, including Kelley Rice, program supervisor of the Des Moines Family Violence Center, say they should never be allowed in domestic-abuse assaults.
Prosecutors ought to proceed with charges even after a victim - often threatened by the abuser - asks that they be dropped, says Rice. After all, it's the state that brings charges, not victims. With the deputies' eyewitness, there was enough evidence to go to trial on the closet incident.
And the ball was dropped here, too. Anytime a victim wants charges dropped, the county attorney is supposed to contact the Family Crisis Support Network in Atlantic, which serves Shelby County victims. Its counselors can then work with the victim. That didn't happen, says Wendy Richter, who runs the network.
Battered-women's advocates say it's rare that a woman fights back with lethal force. One study says in 75 percent of the cases where a man was killed by an intimate female partner, she had been battered by him first.
In this case, there were all the red flags. Dixie was pregnant with her third child when Scott died. He reportedly had been enraged about the pregnancy and demanded she get an abortion. Police reports indicate he had beaten her during an earlier pregnancy. She made three attempts to flee with her children, including once getting all the way to Texas, but at that time Scott brought them back.
It's not right that Scott had to end up dead. No one should endorse vigilante justice. But Dixie probably looked at the previous cycles of assaults, calls to police, arrests, slaps on the wrist and further assaults, speculates Richter, and figured, "It was either "He dies or I die," and he was going to be the one to raise her kids."
Rice sees this much right about Dixie's case. She's alive, and getting community support.
This is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, yet for all the awareness that's been raised, and laws and policies that have been strengthened, offenders still manage to sail through the justice system while victims continue to be brutalized. When dealing with a habitual offender with a demonstrated propensity for violence, the system needs to use every legal tool at its disposal.
Shelby County Attorney Marcus Gross intends to prosecute Dixie for murder, suggesting the shooting was premeditated. But Rice and Richter say even if she wasn't fending off an immediate assault, it could still be viewed as an ultimate act of self-defense.
It would take courage and independence, but Gross could opt for the path of compassion by deciding Dixie Shanahan has been punished enough, dropping the charges and returning her to her children.
http://www.dmregister.com/opinion/stories/c5917686/22612041.htmlJust incredible - his cruelty and her having endured it as long as she did, for whatever reason.
Today's oddities:
YOKO Ono still knows how to get a man to take his clothes off. Peter Jennings was interviewing Ono at last week's ArtWalk event for the Coalition for the Homeless when she somehow talked the news anchor into getting inside a giant black bag with her in front of 500 people at Cooper Union's Great Hall. A few moments later, both emerged with Jennings struggling to put his shirt back on and Ono's own garb disheveled. While no one's quite sure what happened in the bag, everyone was craning their necks to get a glimpse of Jennings bare-chested - including his wife, Kayce Freed, seated in the front row with her mother. (PageSix)
It's been said one cannot be too rich or too thin, but sometimes the very, very rich can be just too darn tacky:
Bare-chested Adonises wearing Speedos, flexing their well-oiled muscles. Toga-clad women dancing around an octagonal pool. An ice sculpture of the statue of David, his rear visible but his vodka-spewing penis not quite in view. Jurors got a private showing yesterday of rich people gone wild - otherwise known as a video of a $2.1 million birthday bash ex-Tyco titan Dennis Kozlowski threw for his wife on Sardinia, an island off the west coast of Italy. full story