One-year-old girl became addicted to drugs through breastfeeding
Interesting thing in Texas. Child Protective Services suspected Danielle Edwards of harming her one-year-old daughter and began investigating the mother. A drug test showed that despite giving birth and breastfeeding, the mother was using cocaine. She herself admitted that she had done this several times over the past two weeks. After this, the guardianship authorities removed the child from the family and analyzed the girl’s hair to determine the presence of drugs in her body. The analysis showed not just the presence of the drug, but the presence of it in large quantities.
As a result, the mother was charged and found guilty of causing injury to a child through negligence. She was also charged with the qualifying feature: the harm caused resulted in serious mental deficiency, impairment, or injury. The mother was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and such a long term was caused precisely by the use of a qualifying feature of the crime. The court of first and appellate instances proceeded from the fact that an addiction to a drug that a child has developed means the onset of these harmful consequences in terms of mental development. However, the state court of criminal appeals (second appeal) did not agree with this decision.
The higher court first decided on the understanding of the terms: since the criminal law did not specifically define what is meant by serious mental deficiency, impairment, or injury, the court used dictionaries to understand the meaning of some words. The words deficiency and impairment caused problems in understanding. Deficiency was understood as "lack of quality" and "abnormal condition." Impairment was understood as "diminution or loss of function or ability." Next, the court analyzed the evidence and came to the following conclusions: the facts of the child’s drug use through the mother’s breast milk and the resulting drug addiction were proven beyond doubt. However, there was no evidence of mental development problems in the case: the testimony of witnesses regarding harm was in the subjunctive mood and in a presumptive manner. The testimony of the mother from the foster family where the child was transferred was accurate, but concerned only the physical, and not the mental, condition of the girl.
The court also did not agree with the use of some cases in the case: lower courts used precedents that considered post-traumatic stress disorder in children of crime victims as a deterioration in mental health sufficient to impute a qualifying characteristic. However, all of these precedents involved physical violence, which clearly differs the factual circumstances from the current case and, therefore, cannot be applied.
As a result, the court remanded the case for a new trial, indicating that its decision did not mean that the qualifying characteristic should not be applied: the court must study this issue again and then decide whether this characteristic can be imputed.
Author: Igor Slabykh
