Child Safety: Homicide by Child Abuse: South Carolina Upholds Conviction under “Crack Mom” Law

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-458
Author(s):  
Marcella Smith
Keyword(s):  
Child Abuse ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Cause Of Death ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Child Safety ◽  
Cocaine Exposure ◽  
Fetal Demise ◽  
Reasonable Degree ◽  
The Supreme Court

In State v. McKnight, the Supreme Court of South Carolina decided 3-2 to affirm McKnight’s conviction for homicide by child abuse based on the finding that her cocaine use during pregnancy caused her daughter to be stillborn. Under South Carolina law, a person is guilty of homicide by child abuse if he or she “causes the death of a child under the age of eleven while committing child abuse or neglect, and the death occurs under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life.” During the trial, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy testified that (1) the only way for the infant to have cocaine byproducts present in her system was ifthe mother had ingested cocaine, and (2) the cause of death was intrauterine fetal demise. Another pathologist testified that there was a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the cause of death was intrauterine cocaine exposure.

The South Confronts the Court: The Southern Manifesto of 1956

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Badger
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
The South ◽  
The Supreme Court

On Monday, March 12, Georgia's senior senator, Walter George, rose in the Senate to read a manifesto blasting the Supreme Court. The Manifesto condemned the “unwarranted decision” of the Court in Brown as a “clear abuse of judicial power” in which the Court “with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.” The signers pledged themselves “to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.” It was signed by nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators, by every member of the congressional delegations from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, by all but one of the representatives from Florida, all but one from Tennessee, all but three from North Carolina, and half of the Texas delegation.

scholarly journals Forty Years of Death: The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty in South Carolina (Still Arbitrary after All These Years)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Blume ◽  
Lyndsey S. Vann
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Gender Bias ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Looking Back

11 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 183 (2016)Forty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States deemed constitutional new death penalty laws intended to minimize the arbitrariness which led the Court to invalidate all capital sentencing statutes four years earlier in Furman v. Georgia. Over the last four decades the Court has — time and again — attempted to regulate the “machinery of death.” Looking back over the Court’s work, many observers, including two current Supreme Court justices, have questioned whether the modern death penalty has lived up to expectations set by the Court in the 1970s or if, despite 40 years of labor, the American death penalty continues to be administered in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. This Article presents data from South Carolina’s forty-year experiment with capital punishment and concludes that the administration of the death penalty in that state is still riddled with error and infected with racial and gender bias. It is — in short — still arbitrary after all these years. The authors maintain that the only true cure it to abolish South Carolina’s death penalty, although they do argue that lesser steps including additional safeguards and procedure may limit, but will not eliminate, some of the arbitrariness and bias which are present in the current imposition of South Carolina’s most extreme punishment.

Desegregating the South, 1955-1970

1979 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Harvie Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The South ◽  
School Officials ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Upper South ◽  
Brown Decision

Southern school desegregation after Brown progressed through four successive stages. The first might be termed absolute defiance, lasting from 1955 until the collapse of Virginia’s massive resistance in 1959. The second was token compliance, stretching from 1959 until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. With that act, a third phase of modest integration began with the efforts of southern school officials to avoid fund cutoffs by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The 1968 Supreme Court decision of Green v. County School Board commenced a fourth phase of massive integration during which the South became the most integrated section of the country. Yet even as the fourth phase developed, a fifth—that of resegregation— was emerging in some southern localities. Breaks in history, of course, are never so neat as their chroniclers might wish. During the defiant stage, for example, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida practiced token compliance. And during much of the token compliance stage, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina practiced total defiance. The different phases thus express only regional momentum as a whole and not the progress, or lack thereof, of a particular state. Even as a gauge of regional momentum, moreover, these phases are imperfect, given wide differences in temperament between the Deep and Upper South. These differences, particularly at first, were important. “In terms of immediate progress toward desegregation in the South,” noted Numan Bartley, “there was precious little to choose between the complex machinations of upper South states and the bellicose interposition of Virginia and the Deep South. But in terms of the future of the Brown decision, the difference was considerable. States of the upper South, with the exception of Virginia, accepted the validity of the Supreme Court decree and aimed to evade its consequences; Deep South states refused to accede any legitimacy to the decision.” Prior to the Kennedy presidency, this division “helped to keep alive the principle of Brown v. Board of Education in the South.” From 1955 to 1968 the Supreme Court remained largely inactive in school desegregation.

Constitutional Law in 1941–1942: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1941

1943 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-289
Author(s):  
Robert E. Cushman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Decisions

The vacancies on the Supreme Court caused by the retirement of Mr. Justice McReynolds and Chief Justice Hughes were filled by President Roosevelt during the summer of 1941. When the Court convened in October, Mr. Justice Stone, originally appointed by President Coolidge, became Chief Justice. Chief Justice White was the only other associate justice to be promoted to the Chief Justiceship. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, and Attorney General Robert H. Jackson of New York took their seats as associate justices. Thus seven justices have been placed on the Court by President Roosevelt. Any idea, however, that these Roosevelt appointees conform to any uniform pattern of thought is belied by the fact that in the 75 cases in the 1941 term turning on important questions of either constitutional law or federal statutory construction, there were dissents in 36, and 23 of these dissents were by either three or four justices. No act of Congress has been declared unconstitutional since May, 1936, when the Municipal Bankruptcy Act was held invalid. Since 1937, the Court has overruled 20 previous decisions, mentioning them by name, while it has modified or qualified a number of others.

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