Gerald Amirault Granted Parole

A Massachusetts Parole Board voted in October to grant parole to Gerald Amirault who was at the center of the Fells Acres child care sex abuse case which marked the start of a nationwide hysteria over alleged ritual sexual abuse.

Amirault still maintains his innocence and his conviction, to put it bluntly, was a travesty. Police in the case used techniques to elicit testimony from child witnesses that would simply not be tolerated today. Police told parents to question their kids about sexual abuse and instructed not to take no for an answer, while a pediatric nurse used dolls to elicit tales of sexual abuse from the children and informed them that they were in “denial” if they said that no sex abuse had taken place.

Police maintained that the Amirault’s abused the children to produce child pornography, but never turned up a single such example of this alleged child porn.

The Amirault case was a contemporary witch hunt and it is outrageous that Gerald Amirault had to spend 17 years in jail based on such a miscarriage of justice.

Amirault is slated to be released on parole in April 2004.

Source:

Gerald Amirault gets parole after 17 years. Tom Mashberg, Boston Herald, October 24, 2003.

Open Season on Children in the United States

One thing I will never understand is why killing a child so often results in so little jail time provided that the person who does the killing is the parent of the child.

Consider the case of 22-year-old Tiffany Trice and her 18-month-old daughter, Victoria Miller.

Victoria died on August 5, 2002. Trice plead guilty to reckless homicide in her death — her plea agreement stipulated that she still maintains her innocence but that concedes there is enough evidence against her to obtain a conviction.

Trice punched her daughter so hard in the stomach and chest that she bruised the little girl’s aorta, leading to her death.

Trice had been held in jail for 14 months awaiting trial. Want to guess how much additional time she’ll spend in jail? Three years? Two years? Surely at least one year.

Well, the plea agreement called for a five year sentence, but the judge in the case released Trice on probation. Provided she doesn’t violate the terms of her probation, she won’t serve a single additional day in prison.

Absolutely disgusting.

Source:

Woman pleads guilty to reckless homicide. Courier-Journal News (Louisville, Kentucky), August 30, 2003.

Local Mom Who Killed Daughter Will Go Free. The Louisville.Com Channel, 2003.

German Court Offers Mixed Ruling in Headscarf Case

In September Germany’s highest court issued a mixed ruling in the case of a Muslim woman who was denied a job at a German school because insisted on wearing a headscarf on the job.

Fereshta Ludin, 31, had successfully interned at another school, but when she applied for a job she was refused unless she agreed to remove the headscarf while teaching.

Annette Schaven, education minister in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg where Ludin sought employment, said the headscarf was “understood as a symbol of the exclusion of women from civil and cultural society” and thus was inappropriate to wear as a teacher.

The German high court ruled that on the one hand, Ludin should not have been denied employment at the school since there is no law against teachers wearing headscarves in public schools. On the other hand, it also ruled that state legislatures in Baden-Wuerttemberg and other German states could pass laws banning teachers from wearing headscarves.

Source:

Muslim teacher wins headscarf fight. The BBC, September 24, 2003.

Judge Allows Lawsuit Over Transgendered Bathroom Controversy to Proceed

A judge in New York paved the way for a lawsuit brought by the Hispanic AIDS Forum to proceed against the HAF’s former landlord. The Hispanic AIDS Forum is suing based on a claim of discrimination against transgendered persons.

The landlord received complaints that transgendered clients who were born male but later became female were using the women’s restroom. When the HAF’s lease was up, the landlord refused to renew the lease and the organization was forced to relocate.

Transgendered advocates argue that there is essentially no criteria — other than personal preference — to dictate which restroom an individual should use. HAF executive director Heriberto Sanchez Soto told Columbia Radio News,

You cannot go to the subway and say I feel uncomfortable with all of you being here, while I am here, I am god, y’all get out so I can have the space to myself.

Jennifer Levi, an attorney at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, told Columbia Radio News,

It is a privacy claim which basically says that it’s inappropriate for an employer or a landlord to ask questions about somebody’s genital makeup in order to determine what appropriate restroom facility they should use and it’s very significant that a judge agreed that info relating to a person’s anatomy is not relevant in determining what restroom they should use.

And, for good measure, an ACLU spokesman compared complaints over transvestites born male using the women’s restroom to Jim Crow-era segregation. James Esseks, Litigation Director of the ACLU’s AIDS Project, told 365gay.com,

It is unfortunate that the bathroom has once again become a battleground in the fight for equal rights. The landlord’s decision to exclude transgendered people from the bathrooms and common areas was just as wrong today as it was 50 years ago when business owners in the South tried to force African Americans to use separate bathrooms.

We’ll see who comes out on top in this pissing contest.

Sources:

Suit against transphobic landlord moves forward. Doug Windsor, 365Gay.Com, October 16, 2003.

Transgender Bathrooms (Transcript). Emily Grossman, Columbia Radio News, March 28, 2003.

Measuring Parental Preferences for Boys Over Girls

A couple of researchers recently published the results of a look at marriage patterns based on the sex of the children in the marriage and came up with a startling conclusion — the fewer male children, the larger the likelihood that a marriage will end in divorce.

Gordon Dahl, with the University of Rochester, and Enrico Moretti, with the University of California at Los Angeles, examined census data on 6 million mothers from over 60 years of census data.

They found that a couple with one daughter is 5 percent more likely to divorce than a couple with one son, and that the more daughters the higher the likelihood of divorce. Couples with three daughters, for example, were 13 percent more likely to divorce than couples with three sons.

Moreover, couples who had only sons were the least likely to divorce, while those who had only daughters were the most likely to divorce.

This follows research by the University of Washington’s Shelly Lundberg which found similar results for single mothers. Single mothers were 42 percent more likely to get married to the father of the child if the child was a boy.

There are a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon with the most obvious being that men appear to have a strong desire to have at least one son. This is consistent with a Gallup poll that for more than 50 years has asked Americans if they could only have one child, would they prefer to have a boy or a girl. Women show little preference, preferring a boy 36 percent to 32 percent for a girl (the remaining having no preference), while men choose a boy 45 percent to 19 percent (the remaining having no preference).

Sources:

Oh, No: It’s a Girl! Steven Landsburg, Slate, October 2, 2003.

Boys help make dads stay. Sarah Baxter and Judith O’Reilly, The Sunday Times (Australia), October 13, 2003.

It’s a Girl! (Will the Economy Suffer?) David Leonhardt, New York Times, October 26, 2003.

Do daughters cause divorce? The Age (Australia), November 13, 2003.

Studies: Women With Breast Implants Have Higher Suicide Rate

Two recent studies of women with breast implants confirmed what previous studies had found — such women had a higher suicide rate than women without breast implants.

A Dutch looked at the cause of death for 3,521 Swedish women who had breast implant surgery between 1965 and 1993. In that group there were 15 suicides. In a similar group of women who had not had breast implant surgery, however, there were only 5 suicides.

Another study in Finland looked at 2,166 women who had breast implant surgery between 1970 and 2000. It also found about a three-fold increase in suicides compared to the regular population, and 6 of the 10 suicides among those women occurred within five years of the breast implantation surgery.

There are a number of possibilities to explain the increase in suicides.

One possibility is that women with serious psychological disorders related to feelings about their body seek out breast implantation surgery. Researchers in both studies urged that cosmetic surgeons do more to screen patients for psychological problems.

Another possibility is that this is simply demographics — young whites tend to have the highest rate of suicide and also tend to be disproportionately select cosmetic surgery.

Finally, European countries tend to have very high rates of suicide as it is. American Society of Plastic Surgeons president Dr. James Wells told Reuters Heath that there doesn’t appear to be any increase in suicides among breast implant recipients in the United States,

We’ve been looking at the U.S. breast implant patient population for many, many years and there has been no evidence of increased suicide rates.

Sources:

Women with breast implants more likely to commit suicide. Mark Kaufman, October 4, 2003.

Study: Women with breast implants have threefold higher suicide risk. Joann Loviglio, Associated Press, September 12, 2003.

Breast implant suicide risk. The BBC, March 7, 2003.

Cosmetic breast implants may raise suicide risk. Reuters Health, October 3, 2003.