By All Means, Let’s Bring Back Parole…….

…..or maybe not.  Here’s the headline from People Magazine:  “Mom Allegedly Left Newborn in Toilet After Giving Birth While on Parole for Role in Death of Another Baby.”  The sub-head is also informative:  “Denette Williams allegedly told police she did not know she was pregnant when she felt cramps and heard a ‘plop’ in the toilet.”

Ah yes, loving motherhood.  What better way to enter the world than as “a plop in the toilet.”

The federal government did away with parole in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 for several reasons.  First, Congress wanted honesty in sentencing, that is, it wanted the sentence pronounced in court to be more nearly the sentence that actually got served, rather than have it sliced-and-diced by a largely anonymous and unaccountable body acting out of sight.  Second, Congress wanted the actual sentence served to be decided by judges rather than by bureaucrats answerable, if at all, only within their own bubble.  Third, Congress had the modesty to understand that we don’t really have a fix either on knowing how to rehabilitate criminals or, relatedly, any reliable means of telling when rehabilitation has occurred versus when it merely seems that it might have occurred.

These factors resonate, tragically, in the People Magazine story.   It continues:

A Texas woman, who is out on parole after being jailed for her role in the death of her infant son, is now being accused of leaving her newborn daughter in the toilet after giving birth.

Denette Williams of Conroe, Tx., is facing child endangerment charges after she allegedly gave birth to her newborn in the toilet and purposefully did not seek medical care, according to local news outlet ABC13….

Williams is out on parole after serving five years in prison for the 2011 death of her infant son, according to local reports.

In 2012, Williams was convicted of first-degree felony injury to a child by omission in the death of 5-week-old, Braylan Hood, according to the Houston Chronicle.

An autopsy revealed that Braylan, who was born premature, suffered a broken neck, a brain hemorrhage and a partially severed spinal cord and was left in his car seat for 11 hours with no medical attention, the newspaper reported at the time of the conviction.

Still, we troglodytes should restrain ourselves from going overboard in blaming mom.  Braylan was going on two months old and should have put up more of a fight!

[Williams’ defense attorney, Judith] Shields told the Houston Chronicle she thinks Williams would not have had new charges filed against her in the current case if she did not have a prior conviction.

Well, yes, it is possible that the authorities might have noticed that Ms. Plop-In-The-Toilet had offed her first kid a few years before.

“I think that when everything is looked at and brought forward that we may find that Denette is not the hideous monster that the state is trying to portray her as, so we’re just gonna keep working to find the truth,” Shields told the Chronicle.

Just so, defense counsel.  The problem here is not your client’s behavior; it is, as ever, the reaction to her behavior.

P.S.  I’ll bet $100 here and now that the one thing defense counsel is not going to “keep working to find” is the truth.