Killing yuh baby and then hiding ah…

By anthony sylvestre

It’s definitely one of the craziest things I have heard in years.

Sometime in August, 2004, a mother and a father were arguing. The father hit his 19 month old child against a wall and the child stopped moving. The mother assisted the father in then wrapping the dead child’s body in a floral cloth thereafter placing the body inside a white bucket and buried the child. The mother and the father told no one and kept the grisly secret to themselves. When questioned about the child’s whereabouts, the parents first told family members that the child died of diarrhea. The mother, however, after persistent inquiries from family members, told the truth. This was four years later. The naturally outraged family member informed the Police. The parents were arrested and charged for hiding the fact of the child’s death. The parents pled guilty to the charge in the Supreme Court and each was fined $2,500.00.

This is as crazy as the news this week that the government is giving the boledo monopoly to its hangout buddy Brads and then justifying this obvious act of nepotism with the hogwash that the move will net the government an additional $1 million each year. But I will speak of Bradsledo at another time.

A talk show host the other day, commenting on this barbaric act by the parents of the dead child, said that a police officer explained that the parents could not be charged for something more serious like murder or manslaughter because the police lacked forensic evidence to prove cause of death. Now wait, let’s examine this for a second. So what forensic evidence did the police have to prove that the skeletal remains found were that of the child?  They didn’t have any, but relied on the statement of the father that he had buried his child there in the yard some years earlier. Couldn’t the prosecution further have used the statement or evidence of the father that he hit the child against a wall, and then with the assistance of the mother buried the child, as evidence to prove murder or manslaughter?

Now I remember one of the first things told to us in my first year of law school was that “the essence of the law is common sense”.  Maybe it is just me, but all the principles of common sense have been thrown out the door with this warped reason given by the police why the parents of the child were charged with merely hiding the dead child’s body.

As readers will no doubt know, murder is committed when someone intentionally causes the death of another; and manslaughter is when you cause harm to someone, without any lawful reason, and that harm causes the person’s death. So, let’s see if the parents could then be charged with either murder or manslaughter.

I agree off the bat that it would have been impossible for the prosecution to prove that the parents intentionally killed the child. The facts do not bear that out. But what is clear however, is the fact that the father hit the child’s head against the wall for no reason. This in law is an unlawful harm.

Now it might be said that we do not know if the child died from head injuries. True, but, surely, if that didn’t caused the child’s death, the burying of the child did. The child definitely couldn’t survive that. The last time I checked, it is unlawful for you to bury someone who is alive. So, if the child was alive when he was buried, an unlawful act would still have been committed. And there is this legal principle too called a continuing act which could have assisted the prosecution in a case of manslaughter against the father and mother. It is clear that the hitting of the child and the burying of the child is a continuing act. The mother’s complicity in the matter would catch her under legal principles of joint enterprise as well; that is, of course, if she in fact did assist the father in burying the body. And the thing is, there is judicial precedent that the parents could have been charged with manslaughter. One which comes to mind is the case of a foster parent who threatened his foster child with severe punishment. The little boy, aged three, became fearful of his foster father and ran away and fell downstairs, dislocating his neck and eventually dying. The foster father was charged with manslaughter and convicted.

And beside, when you look at the crime of concealment of death, it is an offence which deals with a situation where a child may have died at birth and the parents bury the child and do not inform anyone. That is the reason the crime only carries a maximum penalty of 2 years. Compare this with the offence of abortion, which carries a maximum penalty of 12 years. I think it would defy commonsense for our legislators to be harsh on mothers who abort their child, but go easy on parents who kill their children a year or two after birth. That just doesn’t make sense.

Someone therefore dropped the ball with this case. How can we be angry and outraged when our young babies die at our national hospitals but we are not equally vocal when parents kill their young? NOPCA (the National Organization for the Prevention of Child Abuse) and NCFC (National Committed for Families and Children) a word please! It is craziness as I said. Craziness!

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