Sentencing Discount for Woman Who Left Newborn to Die
Here's yet another case in which a mother literally killed her newborn baby and the court gives her a tap on the wrist (Buffalo News, 4/21/09). But it's far more than a standard story of the female sentencing discount at work.
Alicia Zebrun was a college student. She gave birth by herself at home, placed the child in a shoebox and left her in a garbage tote on Hopkins Street. The baby was later found dead. Zebrun spent six months in jail awaiting trial. She was sentenced to one-three years in prison. With credit for time served, she could be out in a matter of months.
Apparently she claimed to have been unaware that she was pregnant. She also claimed she thought the child was stillborn.
Nothing in the article suggests that Zebrun is mentally, emotionally or psychologically incapable of understanding basic things. She's a college student which presumably means she's smarter than average and certainly that she's completed high school. She's probably had a sex ed. course. It strains credulity that she didn't know she was pregnant.
It strains credulity even more that she thought that it was somehow the right thing to do to simply toss the newborn in a dumpster. Even if it had been stillborn, how did she figure that was sensible?
In what must be considered standard practice by now, the article says nothing about the father. Again, he's faceless, nameless and voiceless. Who was he? Why didn't she contact him? Why is it so acceptable in society and popular culture to totally overlook fathers when discussing children?
New York is one of the states with a Safe Haven law. That means she could have turned the baby over to a hospital or other entity designated by the statute to accept newborns unwanted by their parents. She didn't do that either.
And speaking of Safe Haven laws, this article points out that they have failed stem the tide of babies like Zebrun's that are abandoned or killed by their mothers shortly after birth (The New York Times, 1/13/07). On the contrary, the article suggests the number of babies "discarded" by their mothers is on the rise despite Safe Haven laws in 47 states. The good news is that, in the eight years these laws first went into effect, under 900 babies have been surrendered to designated agencies. How many have been killed or abandoned to die, the article doesn't say.
But, if Zebrun's case is any indication, mothers of newborns don't have much to worry about. From conception onward, our society to an astonishing degree, places the lives and wellbeing of children at the discretion of mothers. If they do a good job, fine. But if they don't, we don't take it all that seriously. One-three years for leaving a baby in a garbage tote and letting it die indicts our society and culture far more than it does Alicia Zebrun.
But maybe the court really couldn't give her much more time inside. After all, it has to make room in prisons for all those people convicted of possessing small amounts of marijuana under the mandatory sentencing provisions of the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
Our laws reflect our values.
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