Will the Mother Be Arrested if Her Baby Is Born With Drug Addiction

HANFORD, Calif. —

Chelsea Becker was ready for Zachariah. She'd bought a crib, a auto seat and clothes.

"Here's your infant brother," she'd whisper to her xvi-month-former son Silas, and the child, her youngest, would hug her stomach.

But alone at a friend's house in September, the 25-yr-old knew something was incorrect.

She'd noticed a little bleeding when she'd gotten upwardly to use the bathroom. Before she could make it back to where she'd been lying down, she felt something moisture.

At first, she idea her h2o had broken. And then she realized it was claret.

When her mother, Jennifer Hernandez, came to take her to a hospital and saw her daughter's condition, she called an ambulance instead.

(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

About three hours afterward she arrived at Adventist Health hospital in Hanford, Calif., she delivered a stillborn baby. A staffer handed her the niggling boy then she could say adieu.

The hospital then called the Kings County coroner'due south office.

Nearly two months after, on Nov. 6, constabulary arrested Becker. Prosecutors allege she murdered her kid, citing an dissection report showing the babe had toxic levels of methamphetamine in his system. She's being held in Kings County Jail in lieu of $5-million bail.

About a week after she was taken into custody, Becker sat at a visitation kiosk wearing a green-and-white-striped uniform. Her face was puffy and tear-streaked, the peel around her eyes rubbed raw.

At first information technology was hard for her to find words, then they came all at once.

"I didn't kill my baby," she said between sobs. "I was set up for him. He was so pretty. Then they had me come across him after he was born, and he was all blue."

She acknowledged she'south made mistakes and needs assistance, that she struggles with addiction.

"I wish information technology could have been me instead."

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Becker is at the center of a legal and upstanding debate over the criminalization of drug abuse and pregnancy that's playing out across the country. Legal experts have raised questions well-nigh how the justice system is policing women's bodies and treating mothers who struggle with addiction.

California'due south penal lawmaking defines murder as the unlawful killing of a homo being or unborn child. The statute was amended to include the give-and-take "fetus" in 1970.

Legislators made the modify after the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a Stockton man charged with murder for beating his estranged pregnant wife and causing her to lose the babe.

But the statute was never intended to implicate mothers of stillborn babies, women's rights advocates contend. In fact, other than one example involving a no competition plea, there take been no convictions in such cases in modern state history.

That one also happened in Hanford.

(Hanford Constabulary Department)

Adora Perez was arrested at that place in 2018. She'south at present serving 11 years in a country prison house.

The Kings County commune attorney'due south role led the prosecution against Perez and is now waging a similar murder case against Becker.

"As prosecutors, we follow the police force," Assistant Dist. Atty. Philip Esbenshade said in an email earlier this month. He said the Hanford Police force Section "conducted a very detailed investigation" into Becker and prosecutors "feel that the charge filed is appropriate under California law."

But Lynn G. Paltrow, founder and director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says the case is a misuse of the prosecution's authority.

"There is no function for the criminal constabulary system in response to significant women, pregnancy and the upshot of their pregnancies," Paltrow said. "All these prosecutions practice is deter women from getting care and from speaking honestly nearly their health problems."

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(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

Becker was born and raised in Hanford, a boondocks of neat cul-de-sacs carved into vast tracts of farmland in California's San Joaquin Valley.

The expanse'southward unemployment rate — 5.7% — is the 7th-highest of any metro region in the nation. Almost one-fifth of Kings County residents lived in poverty in 2017, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Methamphetamine is no stranger to the town of 56,000, but that'due south not where Becker first encountered the drug, her mother said.

As a teen, Becker moved to Minnesota to live with her father for several years. She returned at xix an aficionado and plant a steady supply of meth in Hanford, Hernandez said.

The same routes that assistance brand the San Joaquin Valley one of the world's agronomical meccas also aid bring in darker forces. The Central Valley has become a hub for meth distribution in the U.Southward., according to federal law enforcement officials.

(Tomas Ovalle/For The Times)

Because of her addiction, Becker admits she's made poor choices and has struggled as a mother. Ii of her three surviving children were born with meth in their systems, co-ordinate to her family unit. They have all been removed from her intendance.

Becker'south aunt, Julie Lance, who has custody of ii of her children, thinks her niece should face consequences for her actions.

"If they drop these charges and let her out of jail, she'southward just going to practice this over again," Lance said. "She needs mental healthcare, she needs drug rehabilitation — and she needs jail time."

Other members of Becker's family, however, say the criminal charges confronting her are unfair and the D.A.'due south function has made her out to be a monster.

(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

"Nosotros don't condone what happened, but at the same time, what they're painting her to be is not what she is," Becker'due south brother, Brandon Nikonowicz, said. "She'due south somebody with an habit problem, not a murderer."

Since Becker'due south arrest, her family members have badly searched for like cases involving addiction and childbirth. There are prior courtroom decisions in California and elsewhere that could play a prominent office in her fate.

In 1992, San Benito County authorities charged Roseann Jaurigue with murder after she suffered a placental abruption that led to a stillbirth. Government said she'd gone on a cocaine rampage the twenty-four hour period she was due to give nascency and merely sought care at a hospital 2 days later.

Jaurigue's case was the starting time attempt in California to prosecute a adult female nether the 1970 amendment to the penal code.

ACLU defense force lawyers argued the subpoena was non intended to exist used against significant women. Information technology was meant to prosecute people who attack pregnant women with the intention of killing their unborn babies, they said.

A Superior Court judge in San Benito County agreed and dismissed the case.

A year later, in 1993, Lynda Jones was charged with murder in Siskiyou County after she suffered a placental abruption and gave nativity prematurely. The infant died 22 hours subsequently, and authorities blamed methamphetamine utilize. A estimate dismissed the case.

Legal experts are at a loss to explain why now, more 25 years later, prosecutors are using the same rationale against Becker.

"California constabulary clearly does non let a prosecution similar this," said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project.

More broadly, Becker's supporters have pointed to a South Carolina instance that wrestled with many of the same issues involving pregnancy-related drug employ.

(Janet Blackmon Morgan / Associated Press)

In 2001, Regina McKnight was convicted of homicide past child abuse afterwards admitting she used cocaine while pregnant and and so delivering a stillborn babe.

McKnight spent years backside bars earlier the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that she didn't get a fair trial.

The court constitute that McKnight's public defender had failed to challenge testimony from the prosecution's skilful witnesses ruling out natural causes of death.

In its ruling, the state Supreme Court said an adequate defense would have included "contempo studies showing that cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine utilize, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other weather condition commonly associated with the urban poor."

Michele Goodwin, a law professor at UC Irvine and author of the forthcoming book "Policing the Womb," said women prosecuted in connection with the drug-related deaths of stillborn children overwhelmingly alive in poor, unstable environments.

"What makes these prosecutions so deeply problematic is that congruent with these women's poverty and likewise their drug use and addiction happen to be the situations in which they alive," she said.

Despite legal questions raised past these earlier cases, prosecutors in Kings County are moving forrard with Becker's case after having successfully prosecuted Perez.

Perez, now 31, was charged with murder in Jan 2018 afterward suffering a placental abruption and delivering a stillborn babe at Adventist Health in Hanford, the aforementioned infirmary where Becker was treated.

The baby, named Hades, was her 10th. All but the three oldest were born with methamphetamine in their systems, said her aunt, Sabrina Perez.

Initially, hospital employees were sympathetic toward Perez, her aunt said. "They were similar, 'We're sorry for your loss; we'll leave you alone with the baby for a while,' and Adora got to hold him while he was still warm."

Simply as presently as Perez's history of giving birth to drug-exposed babies was discovered, staff immediately took him away, telling her they needed to run tests.

Hospital officials and then called the coroner, and a doctor told police the baby died because of methamphetamine use during pregnancy, court records show.

Although there is no country police requiring medical centers to notify the coroner's office of stillbirths, a spokeswoman for the Adventist Wellness group in the Key Valley, which includes Adventist Health Hanford, said it is the hospital'south policy to call the coroner nigh any stillborn babies delivered over 20 weeks.

Police arrested Perez the morning time after she gave birth, on New Twelvemonth'due south Solar day.

"She didn't get a adventure to mourn her own infant," Sabrina Perez said. "She didn't get a chance to even practice a little reception for her ain child."

Nearly iv months later her abort, Adora Perez pleaded no contest to a charge of voluntary manslaughter as part of a plea agreement. But soon after, she had a change of heart and hired a new attorney, who filed a motion to withdraw the plea.

In courtroom documents, Perez said she hadn't understood what she was doing and her courtroom-appointed public defender neither investigated her baby's death nor discussed potential defenses with her.

Instead, a Kings County Superior Court estimate denied the move and handed Perez an 11-year prison sentence.

Later that, the private-practice lawyer, to whom Perez had paid $ten,000, filed a notice of entreatment with the court and and then stopped returning the family's phone calls, her aunt said.

"Pretty much, she just took Adora's money and that was it."

The appeal went forward, handled by another court-appointed attorney, who offered no new evidence. On March 26, 2019, the fifth District Court of Appeals upheld Perez's judgement.

Becker, meanwhile, is due in court Dec. v, when a judge is expected to set a date for her preliminary hearing.

From her jail cell, she replays events that led up to Zachariah's expiry and wonders how things could have turned out differently.

"I'm non going to exist OK mentally after this, even if I get out." Just, she said, "I'thou non a killer. I just need to go to rehab."

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-26/chelsea-becker-adora-perez-murder-charge-stillbirth