commentary by Patrick H. Moore
To our dismay, while running All Things Crime Blog, we’ve discovered that child abuse takes myriad disturbing forms ranging from child rape to locking kids in cages and starving them — to making them live naked in the backyard while starving them — to locking them in chicken coops with electronic dog collars around their necks — to chaining them to the porch with chickens (live or dead) tied around their necks — to just beating the living hell out of them – and, of course, recently we had the Texas lad Joshua Beard, a clean-cut young man who stomped his 18-year-old girlfriend’s child to death for no apparent reason other than the kid was no doubt an inconvenience and may have cried a lot.
Now we have another case out of Raleigh, North Carolina, in which the mother, a former NANNY, is accused of systematically breaking her 16-week-old baby’s bones over an approximate six week period and BITING him for good measure.This case is especially upsetting, perhaps because the child was so young that he/she didn’t even have time to act up or be obnoxious, not that such typical kid behavior would in any way justify child abuse.
Police have charged a 34-year-old Raleigh mother with biting her 16-week-old baby and breaking the child’s ribs and shoulder blades.
Mary Martin Peele, of Okelly St., was arrested by Raleigh Police Department detectives Monday.
She’s charged with one count of felony child abuse inflicting serious injury and one count of misdemeanor child abuse.
According to arrest warrants obtained by ABC11, Peele allegedly broke 12 of her baby’s ribs and both scapula bones. She also allegedly made a deep bite wound on the boy’s shoulder.
The alleged incidents are said to have occurred between the end of May and mid-July of this year.
Working in criminal defense as an investigator and sentencing mitigation specialist, I often thank my lucky stars that I am not a criminal defense attorney for the simple reason that these beleaguered souls often find themselves in truly impossible situations while attempting to defend their clients. (Of course, I don’t make nearly as much money as the defense attorneys, but hey, you can’t have everything.)
Doing his best to do the impossible on Tuesday, July 29th in the Raleigh courtroom of Judge Jacqueline Brewer, Ms. Peele’s lawyer Damon Chetson pointed out that Ms. Peele has no criminal history and worked for years as a nanny with no complaints of her ever mistreating her youthful charges. It’s always good to start out with the facts and Attorney Chetson appears to have done precisely that.
So what can the lawyer, who needless to say is truly fighting an uphill battle in this matter, do once he’s run out of positive facts? He or she must then resort to “spin”, a time-honored mode of conduct that both defense attorneys and prosecutors engage in on a regular basis. In the case of Lawyer Chetson, he opts to trot out the old sentimentality argument, stating that Ms. Peele’s baby is her “dream child” and that she was only able to carry her child to term after “suffering numerous miscarriages.” Now, if this case did not appear to be so “black-and-white”, this strategy might actually be pretty effective; one can hardly fail to sympathize with a mom who suffers through endless miscarriages, all the while dreaming of giving birth at last to her “dream child.”
The problem is the “dream child” defense is undercut by the hideous nature of what Ms. Peele allegedly did to her child. Fourteen broken bones and a deep bite in the shoulder area is no laughing matter.
Nonetheless, Lawyer Chetson plows doggedly onward stating that his client will fight the charges:
“She stands here telling the court she is not guilty of these charges, and she wants to mount a defense.”
At that point, Chetson relinquished the podium, I suspect to his vast relief.
Prosecutor Melanie Shekita then steps to the fore and makes her case. First, she states, logically enough, that the baby’s injuries “were akin to something he might have suffered in a car accident and were not something he could have done to himself.”
Then she gets heavy:
“For the first 16 weeks of this child’s life someone tortured him. I have grave concerns that if this woman had not presented him to the hospital, and I have no reason to believe that she didn’t do that, that he could have ended up dead,” said Ms. Shekita.
And then, just to get it on the record, Ms. Shekita explains that Ms. Peele “has been telling people the baby has some kind of bone disorder, but that is not the case.”
The baby, of course, could have some kind of bone disorder but that would probably not result in 12 broken ribs and 2 broken scapulas. But perhaps Ms. Peele will ultimately come up with an effective defense of some sort. She’s certainly going to need a strong defense because as things currently stand, “she could face up to 32 years, 9 months in prison on the felony intentional child abuse charge alone.”
Ms. Peele’s bond was originally set at $250,000 and she was ordered not to have contact with any minor under the age of 18 without supervision. The prosecutor requested that her bond be raised to $500,000 and the judge ultimately raised it to $400,000.
Ms. Peele wept in the courtroom suggesting she feels bad about what has happened, and it should be pointed out that, she’s apparently the one who took her injured child to the hospital. If she were completely evil, she would have just kept battering the baby until it died.
So I must say, disturbing as this case is, I hope that Ms. Peele and Lawyer Chetson are able to mount some kind of effective defense that demonstrates that she is not responsible for the horrific harm that was done to the child. The problem is I just don’t see where that defense is going to come from for the simple reason I believe Ms. Peele probably is responsible and I suspect that she will ultimately plead out and will be required to serve a long term of imprisonment.