Perhaps it is a sign of our money grubbing times. Perhaps self-righteousness trumps empathy and the responsibilities of adults to children.
The Lancaster District Attorney, Craig Stedman, has determined that no felony charge should be placed against a teenage high school student due to the concealment of the death of a presumed still born child.
In the past, newspapers likely would have withheld the name of the youth. Today the Intelligencer Journal New Era runs her picture on the front page.
We feel that it would have been wrong to have done this even if she was charged with a felony. Perhaps even if convicted.
But to run the photo for a misdemeanor?
Remember how now Executive Editor Ernie Schreiber used to run titillating articles on prostitution with photos of the accused when the New Era was our evening newspaper? Recall at the same time his midday reporting of exit polls during local elections despite such practices being considered unethical by the national press?
Kids make mistakes. The job of adults is to take them by the hand and try to help them find a proper path for life, not to shame them before their community.
We wonder how many times this happens in our suburban schools from year to year. I doubt that we will read about it; nor should we. We presume exploiting a friendless child recently arrived from Haiti doesnt risk losing subscribers or advertisers.
Schreiber would not be so reckless (hopefully) as to do this with a family member from the Lancaster elite!
I specifically remember when three F & M students ripped off several bottles of liquor from the Iron Hill Brewery. The story was completely buried even though one of the perps was a local basketball hero and convicted.
This double standard, which also tends to be racially aligned, should have no place in Lancaster.
The only reason this ADULT woman (19 years old at the time of her arrest) wasn’t charged with murder is that the autopsy results were inconclusive. Most infants born 27 to 29 weeks after conception survive and grow to become healthy babies, children, and adults. The fact that the medical examiner could not tell whether the baby was born alive does not excuse the callous, sickening actions of the woman. Either she deliberately killed her infant son, or did nothing to help save him; then she horribly abused his corpse, trying to flush him down the toilet and, when that didn’t work, discarding him in a trash can.
It is outrageous that someone would dismiss this woman’s monstrous behavior with the phrase, “Kids make mistakes”, and it is REVOLTING that someone would equate stealing a few bottles of liquor with the death of an infant and the abuse of his corpse.
To some people, a premature baby doesn’t deserve much more consideration than one still in utero (one you’d call a fetus, and whose death, even if it involves being torn limb from limb by surgical instruments, you no moral qualms about). Yet it is completely DEGENERATE to give tacit approval, as you are did through your comments, to disposing of a black baby as one would dispose of excrement or garbage. YOU are the ones who are racist, morally bankrupt, and without decency.