Posted on 12/02/2005 3:04:41 PM PST by NYer
Honolulu, Dec. 02, 2005 (CNA) - Yesterday, the Hawaii state Supreme Court handed over a precedent-setting opinion, ruling that 32-year old Tayshea Aiwohi could not be convicted of killing her unborn child, because at the time, it was not a “person.”
In July of 2001, Aiwohi gave birth to her son, Treyson, who died two days later due to his mother’s use of methamphetamine while she was pregnant.
She was initially convicted of manslaughter but was able to appeal the decision all the way to the high court. To date, no appeals court in the U.S. has ever upheld an manslaughter charge for a mother who caused the death of her child while pregnant.
In their Thursday decision, all five of Hawaii’s Supreme Court Justices agreed that the charge should be overturned because, they said, the child was not a “person” when Aiwohi smoked the drug.
When he was born, Treyson was found to have had high levels of methamphetamine in his system and Aiwohi even admitted to having taken a “hit” on the morning of his birth.
According to the Honolulu Advertiser, City Deputy Prosecutor Glenn Kim, who handled the trial and appeal, was disappointed in the decision. "We continue to believe that babies such as Treyson Aiwohi deserve the protection of the law," he said.
"And we also continue to believe that people like Tayshea Aiwohi doing what she did to her baby continue to deserve to suffer the consequences of the law for those actions."
And "Planned Parenthood" wouldn't have it any other way. They'll tolerate no court decision that threatens in any was those cash cows of theirs...aka:their abortion mills!
ML/NJ
How about "Ua mau ke ea o ka 'aina i ka pakalolo."
I guess what Planned Parenthood really need is a one week post-birth abortion window to this type of thorny issue from cropping up.
Thank you! I feel much better about this now.
Learn to read.
I think it can be appealed to Federal court, right? Didn't the Justice Department recently say it recognizes a fetus as a person and would prosecute double homicide cases of mother and child accordingly. Dealing with federal law here.
FYI "The Church" is not some patty-cake playing CINO Hawaii Governor and Speaker of House...The Church on Earth is the clergy, headed by the Pope.
The "chattel" may not even have the same blood type or sex as the woman - so the fetus or chattel is not a property or an extention of the woman -
But the embryo, fetus, chattel, unborn - whatever one chooses to call it, has rights as any individual human being has Because it is a human and not some other creature.
The only difference between all those stages is growth!
The human "product of conception" Never evolves into anything except a human being!
There was no constitutional issue in this case; the court was interpreting the language of the Hawaii statute. So it can't go to SCOTUS.
Better yet there is already case law and precedence for drug and chemical manufacturers that have been found liable for 'birth defects' -this ruling seems to fly in the face of already established law....
True, but even though the job of course has, historically, been to apply common law to cases not adequately addressed by statute, courts have lately turned to the invention of new "laws" which are contrary to both statute and common law.
Even if the fetus was "chattel" for legal purposes, the law (particularly common law) still has to apply some degree of common sense. OK, so the fetus was "chattel". But it's undeniably a type of chattel that becomes a legal person, so if you deliberately do something to it that causes the legal person to die, one would think the law should draw the obvious conclusion.
Suppose I shoot someone in Illinois. The person goes to a hospital in Wisconsin and then dies. Should Wisconsin have any authority to charge me with anything? I would think that prosecution would be restricted to the state where the criminal act itself took place.
It would seem illogical to suggest that an action by a pregnant woman (prior to birth) that harms her unborn child is legal if and only if the woman makes certain that the child is thoroughly dead prior to birth. Note that actions taken after birth are a whole 'nother story.
To use another analogy: if someone breaks into your house, you shoot him, and then he dies five blocks away, does the fact that he died some distance away rather than inside your house make you guilty of murder?
What do you think the law would say if criminal damage to a fetus caused the baby, postnatally, to experience chronic agonizing pain, and it could be shown that this would not have been the case if the damage hadn't occurred?
Whether or not the law should regard babies as the absolute chattel of the mother, the Supreme Court has declared that it does. You may not like the implications of that (I sure don't), but they are what they are.
Sure it does. Sometimes it evolves into two human beings.
The court says otherwise. Your mythology loses.
The Supreme Court has declared that an umborn baby is a person if, and only if, the woman carrying it wants it to be so. I think one could make an argument, even given that, that a woman who damages her child in utero must, if the child is born alive, face the choice of either giving the child up for adoption or being prosecuted for harming it (if she won't give the child up for adoption, that would indicate that it was a wanted child, and ergo had been a person while in the womb).
I strongly dislike the Court's declaration, but believe the Hawaii ruling was a necessary consequence.
No argument from me -- I was making a legal point. This is one of those really tricky legal matters where any reasonable standard will produce a lot of ugly edge cases. It is unavoidable. If the charge had held up in court, it would have generated a whole raft of completely unrelated legal issues that no one would be happy with either.
I would think it would be easy enough to charge the woman with a crime for being intoxicated like she was while pregnant. That would have no legal ambiguity and still achieve the desired social result. The deeper problem is that crackheads don't care if they are breaking the law, so no amount of consequences are going to matter very much in stemming the problem.
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