Woman who withheld son"s cancer drugs out of pity admits attempted murder

A Massachusetts woman who withheld cancer medication that doctors said could have saved her autistic son’s life was freed on Wednesday after pleading guilty to attempted murder.

Kristen LaBrie, 44, was sentenced to time already served at a change of plea hearing in Salem superior court that ended the decade-long case.

LaBrie, of Salem, did not speak to reporters after Wednesday’s hearing, but her lawyer said it was time to move on. “She’s going to have to live with this for the rest of her life,” said John Morris, who was not her trial attorney.

LaBrie was sentenced to eight to 10 years in prison after her conviction.

Her son, Jeremy Fraser, was diagnosed with a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at seven and died in 2009, aged nine.

In 2011, she was convicted in 2011 of attempted murder as well as assault and battery and reckless child endangerment, and spent five years behind bars. In March the state’s highest court granted her a new trial on the attempted murder charge after ruling her trial attorney was ineffective because he failed to consult an independent oncologist to try to rebut the prosecution’s claim that LaBrie withheld her son’s medication because she wanted to kill him.

The supreme judicial court also threw out the assault and battery charge and upheld the reckless endangerment charge.

She was released from prison in April.

Testifying in her own defense, she said she largely followed doctor’s orders at first, but acknowledged that she stopped giving him the at-home medications because she couldn’t bear to see how he suffered from the side-effects, which she thought would kill him.

LaBrie was divorced from Jeremy’s father, Eric Fraser, who died in a motorcycle crash just a few months after his son.

Essex district attorney Jonathan Blodgett said on Wednesday the case was always about justice for Jeremy.

“We are satisfied that the sentence was fair, balanced, reasonable, and was tempered with mercy,” he said.

Woman who withheld son"s cancer drugs out of pity admits attempted murder

If stillbirth is murder, does miscarriage make pregnant ladies into criminals?

7 and a half many years in the past, a Mississippi teenager named Rennie Gibbs went into premature labor and delivered a stillborn baby woman named Samiya. Initially, authorities attributed the baby’s death to the umbilical cord wrapped all around her neck. But when traces of a cocaine byproduct showed up on the autopsy report, a healthcare examiner declared the stillbirth a homicide and cited cocaine toxicity as the lead to. Shortly afterward, the sixteen-12 months-old Gibbs was charged with murder, particularly “depraved heart murder”, a charge that can carry a sentence of up to twenty many years to existence in prison.

Given that her grand-jury indictment in 2007, Gibbs’s group of attorneys has been fighting for the fees to be dropped on both technical and legal grounds. The defense argues that there is no scientific proof that cocaine use can lead to a stillbirth – and that the “depraved heart murder” statute did not apply to unborn children at the time of Samiya’s death. A selection is expected any day now as to no matter whether the Gibbs situation will lastly proceed to trial or get dismissed. If it does go to trial, and Gibbs is convicted of murder for getting sixteen and pregnant, then a unsafe precedent might be established that need to make anyone with a uterus come to feel quite afraid.

This week, I spoke with a single of Gibbs’s attorneys, Robert McDuff, who advised me that he volunteered his services to the public defender assigned to the case back in 2009 because he was concerned about the implications for women all over the place if the prosecution is profitable:

It’s ridiculous that this teenager is being prosecuted for a murder charge not justified by both law or science. If she can be experimented with for allegedly taking drugs throughout her pregnancy, what is to end other women who miscarry or endure a stillbirth from becoming prosecuted simply because they smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol or just did not adhere to their doctor’s orders?

Central to the Gibbs situation is whether or not her alleged cocaine use directly caused her baby’s stillbirth. A latest ProPublica investigation by Nina Martin goes into some detail on this aspect, outlining serious doubts surrounding the health care examiner’s conclusion that medication had been the lead to of death. The reliability of the examiner’s work has been called into query prior to, and at least four murder convictions based mostly on his proof have been overturned.

Beyond the Mississippi justice program, the back links between drug use and stillbirths remains sketchy at ideal: there is no conclusive evidence that cocaine use in fact harms fetuses – or at least harms them irreparably. A 25-yr study that followed infants born to crack-addicted mothers discovered that even though youngsters had been slow to create, the figuring out factor was not their mothers’ gestational cocaine use so significantly as the poverty in which they had been raised. This is not to say that smoking crack or smoking anything at all is recommended throughout pregnancy – a current National Institutes of Overall health review did locate that smoking cigarettes or taking drugs can increase the risk of a stillbirth.

But must females who engage in unhealthy activities for the duration of their pregnancies genuinely be criminalized – to life in prison – if they fail to make a healthier infant? If so, the place do you draw that line?

Just believe for a 2nd exactly where such a policy could lead us. Like numerous girls of her time, and numerous girls because, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis smoked whilst she was pregnant. Jackie-O had a historical past of troubled pregnancies – at least one particular miscarriage, a stillborn daughter and infant Patrick, who barely survived two days. Individuals losses induced the Kennedy family members tremendous discomfort. Now picture if an overzealous prosecutor made a decision that Jackie’s smoking had harmed the infants and indicted the First Lady on murder costs.

Such a scenario may well appear far-fetched indeed, for a female in the Kennedy demographic, it is. But for poor females – particularly bad black ladies suspected of drug use who fail to carry infants to term – criminalization is presently a popular sport. Final year, the Nationwide Advocates for Pregnant Girls (NAPW) launched a examine detailing hundreds of cases of ladies who have been arrested and imprisoned when they suffered stillbirths or miscarriages because of the anti-feticide laws that are in location in most states.

These laws, in 38 states, had been meant to protect pregnant women and the babies they carry from attacks by third parties. Increasingly, they are being utilised to prosecute the pregnant females alternatively. In accordance to NAPW executive director Lynn Paltrow, 99% of the situations the group documented never ever went to trial. The females basically pled guilty and accepted the punishment meted out to them. This is why Paltrow believes this week’s Gibbs decision is so critical – since a conviction would only embolden prosecutors and would location many, several more women at chance. As she advised me:

By creating the end result of pregnancy a crime, we would establish a principle that the minute a female conceives, every little thing she does can be perceived as attempted murder or attempted assault. Not taking enough bed rest could be interpreted as attempted assault. Inform a psychiatrist you are suicidal, and they could report you for attempted murder.

There is nonetheless a respectable likelihood a Mississippi judge could throw out the case of Rennie Gibbs. But if it does proceed, she will be the 1st girl in the state – and potentially the country – to in fact face a trial for murder following suffering a stillbirth. That is the mass criminalization of pregnancy, and that is a battle in the “War on Ladies” we shouldn’t even have to battle.

If stillbirth is murder, does miscarriage make pregnant ladies into criminals?

Pakistan polio vaccinator"s murder by militants raises well being workers" fears

A Pakistani well being worker marks the finger of an Afghan refugee kid after giving her a polio vaccine. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

The uncommon evening-time kidnapping and brutal murder of a female polio vaccinator in the troubled Pakistani city of Peshawar has heightened fears amongst well being employees struggling to stamp out the virus in the face of violent opposition from militant groups.

The entire body of Salma Farooqi, a thirty-yr-outdated who had been concerned for many years in Peshawar’s battle against polio, was recovered from a area 4km (two.5 miles) from her residence on Monday, a day following armed males stormed her property, tied up family members members and took her away.

Police mentioned the mom of 5 had been tortured and repeatedly shot.

Attacks on vaccination teams, a lot of of whom are drawn from the country’s 100,000 sturdy army of “Lady Health Workers”, are typical, with far more than 30 killed in the last two many years. But attacks at their homes are virtually unheard of.

Loved ones members said armed men entered the house at about 1am on Sunday morning, right after some of them climbed in excess of the boundary wall of the creating in Gulozai village on the edge of the frontier city of Peshawar.

“Salma was rapidly asleep following to me when the men came in, beat me and tied me and the youngsters up,” explained her husband, Mohammad Karim Khan. “It took us an hour to totally free ourselves and then we saw that Salma had disappeared.”

A kid held by his brother receives a polio vaccine from a Pakistani overall health employee on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

Ihsan Shah, the police inspector responsible for the neighbourhood, said it was premature to speculate about the attainable motives of the attackers.

But Tariq Khan, an uncle of the dead lady, mentioned he was convinced she was targeted for her function.

“We have no enmity with any individual, but she had been taking element in the polio vaccination campaign for many years,” he stated. “The government only provide security for the duration of the vaccination function because they are being paid millions of bucks by the worldwide local community.”

The day before her violent abduction, Farooqi took part in a polio campaign, part of a huge effort by the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to stamp out the crippling condition.

Peshawar was not too long ago named by the Planet Health Organisation as the “greatest reservoir of endemic polio virus in the globe”.

Every weekend for 3 months up to 8,000 vaccinators are trying to give oral polio drops to almost every child aged below five in the city.

As in other components of the nation, the threat of attacks by militants has forced wellness workers to be accompanied by armed police as they go door-to-door seeking for young children to inoculate against a illness that has been eradicated in virtually each and every other country in the planet.

Militants are deeply suspicious of the vaccinations, which have been demonised by radical clerics as supposedly component of a western plot to sterilise Muslim youngsters.

They also dread the campaigns could be utilized as a cover for spies. In 2012, Taliban commanders in Waziristan, a tribal location bordering Afghanistan, banned polio teams until finally US drone strikes came to an finish.

Mohammad Tahir, a national spokesman for the country’s Lady Wellness Employees, mentioned a committee had been launched to investigate no matter whether Farooqi had been killed because of her work.

“The killing has produced an even higher sense of worry,” said Tahir. “We have to have greater protection.”

Pakistan polio vaccinator"s murder by militants raises well being workers" fears

Medicine Or Mass Murder? Guideline Primarily based on Discredited Research Might Have Triggered 800,000 Deaths In Europe Above The Last 5 Years

Final summer season British researchers provoked concern when they published a paper raising the probability that by following an established guideline Uk medical doctors might have triggered as a lot of as 10,000 deaths each and every year. Now they have gone a stage further and published an estimate that the same guideline may have led to the deaths of as many as 800,00 folks in Europe in excess of the last 5 many years. The discovering, they publish, “is so massive that the only context in the last 50 many years comes from the largest scale professional failures in the political sphere.” The 800,000 deaths are comparable in size to the worst instances of genocide and mass murder in latest background.

Hannibal Lecter (Photograph credit: Wikipedia)

In their new post published in the European Heart Journal, Graham Cole and Darrel Francis continue to investigate the extent and implications of the injury brought on by the Don Poldermans research misconduct situation. The earlier paper demonstrated the potentially large and lethal consequences of the current European Society of Cardiology guideline recommending the liberal use of beta-blockers to safeguard the heart in the course of surgical procedure for folks undergoing non cardiac surgical procedure. The guideline was flawed due to the fact it was partly primarily based on unreliable research performed by the disgraced Poldermans (who also served as the chairman of the guideline committee). This could look like a very technical query but it effects several millions of men and women and may possibly, as Francis and his colleagues have demonstrated, led to a lot of thousands of pointless deaths.

The new article, the 1st of two parts, makes no new scientific claims, but as an alternative commences to contemplate the broader implications of the story. Cole and Francis briefly contemplate the dilemma of clinicians who may possibly “feel unable to act in contravention of guideline recommendations recognized as ‘state-of-the-art’ by the European Society of Cardiology” and who might even be penalized for failing to follow tips.

They note that much more than half of the lives lost– potentially much more than 400,000– may “have occurred after the research was discredited,” however some of the injury could have been mitigated if doctors  changed their practice soon after reading through about the controversy. (There was a two year delay soon after the start of the Poldermans affair until the ESC  withdrew the beta-blockade recommendation.)

Cole and Francis argue that a lot demands to be transformed in the application of medical study:

The aviation occupation has led the way in systems to stop, identify, review, and understand from skilled failures. Clinical medication is now following the very same path. We must produce similar programs for study.

In the 2nd part of their report, to be published in two weeks, Cole and Francis will increase the possibility that the obligation for misconduct lays not just with misguided researchers like Poldermans but also the institutions and the institutional leaders that offer uncritical help to research factories. Further, they will go over the part of journal editors and, even, journal readers.

Comment: It would be effortless to dismiss the views of Cole and Francis as outrageous and overly provocative. After all, with the exceptions of Josef Mengele or Hannibal Lecter, medical doctors aren’t usually murderers, at least not intentionally. My best guess is that the Don Poldermans of this globe strongly feel they are carrying out great, even though that might lead to cutting corners and, then, covering up the corner cutting.

But there are very good factors to consider that this sort of provocation is necessary. There is, it has now turn out to be clear, a basic lack of concern and response to proof of scientific fraud and misconduct. Journal editors, deans, division chairs, and others look much more concerned with safeguarding the track record of their respective institutions than aggressively upholding the integrity of science and research. Of course, defending science and keeping the reputation of an institution must not be opposing options. But since they are, maybe a tiny provocation is in order.

Medicine Or Mass Murder? Guideline Primarily based on Discredited Research Might Have Triggered 800,000 Deaths In Europe Above The Last 5 Years