When even Ann Coulter is right

[fpb]

I have had a thing or two to say about Ann Coulter in the past, little of it sympathetic. But in this case, http://townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2009/12/09/martha_coakley_too_immoral_for_teddy_kennedys_seat?page=full&comments=true&sort=asc#comments , she is absolutely right, probably more right than she knows. When I heard Martha Coakley's name mentioned, I knew it sounded familiar; and suddenly I remembered that she was the prosecutor in the case of a British nanny who was convicted of murdering a baby in a "shaken baby syndrome" trial some ten years ago - a case that had made me boil with indignation. You may remember that "shaken baby syndrome", was the be-afraid-be-very-afraid child-related horror du jour, having replaced - what else - satanic abuse in that role. Since then it has been largely discredited, but at the time several people on both sides of the Atlantic were charged and sometimes convicted on the flimsiest of evidence. The reasoning seemed to be: "Here is a dead baby - someone must be responsible for it!" One detail from Coakley's case is burned in my memory. According to the prosecution so-called experts, the baby had suffered injuries "comparable to being hit by a train". The notion of a young woman, an ordinary young woman mind you, not only shaking a baby for minutes at a time, but doing so - shaking, mind you; not smashing against the wall or throwing on the floor, just shaking - "with enough strength to be comparable to being struck by a train"; where on the face of God's green Earth did they find twelve men and women to believe such an enormity? The jury ignored the defence experts, who showed that the so-called injuries were consistent with a rare but well documented syndrome where the plates of a baby's skull fail to stick together, and convicted the girl of murder. I said at the time that we should hear from Coakley again, in elected office, and I was right. One detail: the alternate jurors, who had been listening to the whole trial from a neighbouring room, were so furious at the verdict that they trashed the furniture.

Evidently, Martha Coakley makes a habit of seizing on false prosecutions based on popular but ill-grounded terrors to advance her career. Just the type the good people of Massachusetts want to represent their interests and values in the Senate of the nation.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Stopped clocks and all that. But you can be sure Coulter wouldn't have said a word against Coakley if she were a Republican.

I vaguely remember that case, and believing that the conviction sounded a little fishy. (I also -- very vaguely -- recall the nanny's case being presented on several American news magazine shows, generally portraying her in a sympathetic light. I think the narrative went something like, "Poor young Brit took the fall for rich absentee parents.")

I'm always hesitant to accept any external narrative about whether or not a trial was fair or not, though. I've seen a lot of verdicts that seem (and have been depicted as) completely outrageous, but if you really dig into the details, including things the jury did and did not hear that weren't disseminated to the media, you get a very different picture.

(I feel the same way about Amanda Knox. There are things that make me question her guilt; there are also things that make me doubt her innocence. But I wasn't in the courtroom listening to all the testimony.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Coulter did not seem to know of the nanny case. I had never heard of Coakley's involvement in the Amirault case (although I had heard of it). Two corresponding testimonies from two different persons who have seen the same person behaving in the same way in two different crises have, to my historian's mind, a vast evidential value.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

I agree that Coulter would not have said one word if a Republican was involved, unless they were a moderate Republican.

Finidng myself in full agreement with Coulter over this was bad enough, imagine my distress to discover that her favourite band were the Grateful Dead!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You have my sympathy. My favourite is Bruce Springsteen - and I can't stand his politics or half his fans. But a gang of notoriously "chemical" hippies seems a strange choice for the maenad of the movement right.