Article of Faith: How Courts Treat Religious Child Abusers
This article about the courts’ purported tendency to be lenient on parents convicted of faith-based criminal negligence that results in their children’s deaths caught my eye.
Writing in yesterday’s Washington Post Outlook section, Jonathan Turley, public interest law professor at George Washington University, compares a handful of cases of parents convicted of non-religious neglect with those of parents who say their faith made them withhold lifesaving medical care, and finds that judges are apt to throw the book at the former and slap the wrists of the latter—even when absolutely no remorse is shown.
Turley focuses in particular on a case out of Wisconsin, a state that, he says, has an “exemption for faith-based neglect under its child abuse laws.” He goes on:
“Leilani and Dale Neumann were sentenced for allowing their 11-year-old daughter, Madeline Kara Neumann, to die in 2008 from an undiagnosed but treatable form of diabetes. The Neumanns are affiliated with a faith-healing church called Unleavened Bread Ministries and continued to pray with other members while Madeline died. They could have received 25 years in prison. Instead, the court emphasized their religious rationale and gave them each six months in jail (to be served one month a year) and 10 years’ probation.”
Next Turley focuses on the Washburn family, whose toddler died “after hitting his head at home in Cross Lanes, W.Va.”
“His parents, Elizabeth Dawn Thornton and Christopher Steven Washburn, said the boy fell a lot and hit his head on the corner of a table and his chin on a toilet. […] The court sentenced both parents to three to 15 years in prison.
“So the Neumanns got one month in jail for six years and kept custody of their children, and the Washburns got up to 15 years in prison and agreed to give up their kids.”
Later, Turley cites another disparate sentence in a case of “lifestyle” neglect: two vegan parents who in 2007 were given life in prison after being convicted of malice murder (among other crimes) in a Georgia court. They’d deprived their child of animal-based products that the court said led to his malnourishment and death.
In an online discussion about the article, Turley argues that laws such as Wisconsin’s that essentially allow parents to use faith as a mitigating factor may “facilitate such deaths by not only imposing low sentences but prevent[ing] the other children from being removed from the household.”
Still, it’s hard to determine from Turley’s article if courts in states without specific religious exemptions are routinely softer on faith-based parental neglect or if the lack of uniformity of state child abuse laws might be a contributing factor (indeed, Turley notes that the Supreme Court has left such cases to state law). And the only national data he cites—a relatively low number of 300 child deaths from lack of care since 1975—is from Children’s Health Care Is a Legal Duty, which advocates against religious-based medical neglect.
Regardless, it’s a provocative topic and one certainly worth raising. For more, read an August 2009 discussion on Faith Healing and the Law from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which discusses, among other things, how a key federal regulation led to the state-based exemptions that Turley references:
“[B]efore 1974, very few states had explicit statutory exemptions from criminal prosecution for parents who relied on faith healing rather than traditional medicine to treat a child’s illness. These statutes became very common, however, in 1974 after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services enacted an important regulation on the subject. This regulation required that states receiving funds for child abuse prevention programs adopt exemptions for parents who practiced faith healing. Although this federal regulation was rescinded in 1983, by that time the vast majority of states had enacted some kind of exemption from prosecution for parents who practiced this type of spiritual healing, and most of these states still have such exemptions.”