In August 2004, a Georgia woman named Samantha J. Davis perpetrated a hideous atrocity. According to an Associated Press article, she was upset that her 6-year-old son had been “talking back.†Samantha Davis heated a pair of scissors on her kitchen stove, held them to the back of the child’s neck, then cut off a piece of his tongue.
What is her punishment for committing a horror worthy of a Medieval Inquisitor? After pleading guilty to two counts of child cruelty, she has been sentenced to serve between 60 to 180 days in a detention center before going on probation for ten years. She must also attend a 25-week parenting class and a nonviolence class. She will be allowed only supervised visits with her son who has been in the custody of his father since the crime. They were separated at the time of the incident.
Judge Wade Crumbley may have been influenced to this leniency because the father, Toby Davis, filed papers with the court saying he did not want to cooperate with the prosecution and requesting that the charges be dropped. The tortured and mutilated little boy signed an affidavit asking that his cruel and warped mother not be prosecuted.
Samantha Davis’ attorney Rickey L. Richardson told the Associated Press that Toby Davis told the judge that his estranged wife “is a good woman and he doesn’t feel his son is unsafe around her.â€ÂÂ
It seems to this writer that the incredibly light sentence Mother Davis received for abusing her son is, at least to some extent, the result of sexism. A father who perpetrated such torture and mutilation would have been very likely to receive the appropriate punishment of years in prison.
I also believe parts of the sentence verge on an obscene joke. Parenting class? A mother or father who uses excessive corporal punishment or is emotionally abusive could rightly be ordered to attend a parenting class. No one should need a class to teach them that burning and mutilating a child is not acceptable discipline. What’s more, Samantha Davis should not be allowed any contact with the son she so grievously wronged, supervised or not. Her offense ought to have led to the termination of her parental rights.
However, that would not necessarily mean putting this poor, mistreated boy in the sole custody of his father. Toby Davis’ attitude toward his son’s abuser, his insistence that she is a “good woman,†calls into question his own competency as a parent. It could reflect a misguided chivalry but it unquestionably reflects an error in judgment.
The court is coddling a criminal. The American system is failing a child.
