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Floyd: For a broken, dead baby Dallas parents get soft landing
01:05 AM CST on Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Four years ago, I fielded an angry e-mail about my condemnation of a Dallas couple accused of battering their baby daughter to death.
The writer slapped me around for being unduly harsh, saying, "God has a forgiving heart, no matter what the situation is."
Dallas County must have a heck of a forgiving heart, too.
The parents - the prime and sole suspects of beating 3-month-old Tyreona Mabry so often and so savagely that death must have been a deliverance - walked out of court last week on terms too generous to be called a "slap on the wrist."
The mother and father, Tameika Hampton and Tremaine Mabry, both admitted causing the infant's injuries. In return, the charges against them were dramatically reduced and both received probation.
Rub your face in these facts, wallow in them, let them soak into your brain:
Here, in our ostensibly civilized city, a helpless little baby suffered 40 deliberately inflicted rib fractures, three leg fractures, chest contusions, facial bruises, bleeding in the brain and both eyeballs, a broken back, a bruised liver - and that's only what the autopsy found. She suffered more pain and terror during her 90-day life than most of us would in 90 years.
The people who have admitted they are responsible are sentenced to probation, as if they had shoplifted a turkey or bought a bag of dope.
How did this happen? Well, for one thing, politics.
The case had been investigated and was being prepared for trial when, in 2006, Craig Watkins was elected Dallas County DA. With a new administration, the veteran prosecutor who had been handling the case was pink-slipped, along with several other high-ranking members of the prior regime.
Because his new felony prosecutor had once represented Ms. Hampton on unrelated charges, Mr. Watkins properly recused his office from the case to avoid any conflict. In other words, a lot of the players changed.
"We had nothing to do with" the prosecution, Mr. Watkins told me. "When I read the newspaper, I was just as surprised as you are."
Last year, Judge Lena Levario appointed a special prosecutor in the case, Dallas criminal-defense lawyer Juan Sanchez.
Mr. Sanchez told me the case was too shaky to take before a jury because neither parent was willing to testify against the other.
"It's a rough case," he said Monday. "Both of them said, 'I didn't do it, and I don't know who did.' I had to make a tactical decision."
He said the police who originally investigated the case didn't give him enough to work with.
"I wish they would have separated [the parents] and interrogated them aggressively from the beginning," Mr. Sanchez said.
Under terms of the probation agreement, Judge Levario can now send either of the defendants to prison for even the most minor violation - an alternative, he said, that was better than risking an acquittal in a jury trial.
Not everybody agrees.
"It's a travesty of justice," said Patricia Hogue, the veteran child-abuse prosecutor who was fired when Mr. Watkins took office. She was preparing the case for trial when she left.
Ms. Hogue said she had been crafting a careful timetable that she believes would have proved that nobody besides the parents - one or both - could have caused Tyreona's fatal injuries.
As for their refusal to testify against one another, she said the case was indicted under Texas' law of parties, which says co-defendants share culpability in the commission of a capital crime even if it can't be proved which one actually committed the act.
Moreover, Ms. Hogue said, a detailed analysis of medical records gave added weight to the case against the parents. For example, she said, Tyreona's parents took her when she was 1 month old to an emergency room, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
At least one medical expert who reviewed those records, she said, was willing to testify that what appeared to be pneumonia was actually blood that had leaked into the baby's lungs as a result of internal injuries suffered in a beating.
Ms. Hogue said countless child-abuse cases are thus made, by piecing together medical evidence, timetables, witness statements.
She thinks there would have been a conviction, if not for capital murder, at least for a good stretch of prison time if an expert in child-abuse cases had been appointed to prosecute.
"I would have done it for free," she said.
Well, nobody in the justice system meant deliberate harm. Nobody said, "Let's let these baby killers go free."
But, through a series of missteps, political considerations, casual inattention and overlooked circumstances, Tyreona Mabry was tortured and abused in a manner we would not tolerate for enemy combatants, incarcerated prisoners or stray dogs.
And nobody is called to account.
Instead, Tameika Hampton (who, Mr. Sanchez said, no longer lives with Mr. Mabry) has had two more children, both now in the custody of other relatives, since being indicted on a capital murder charge in her baby's death.
Please excuse my incorrect self for saying that somebody needs to take this woman to the drugstore.
The baby herself, Tyreona, had a brief and hideous life that could be summed up in three words: Born. Beaten. Died.
She deserved better, says Beverly Levy, director of Dallas Court Appointed Special Advocates and a fierce champion for all those invisible children.
Ms. Levy was in the nearly deserted courtroom last week, where she read a victim-impact statement on the baby's behalf at Ms. Hampton's sentencing hearing.
"Our system failed this child over and over again, and we're acting as if she didn't exist," she said.
"She deserved justice, and we didn't give it to her."
Floyd: For a broken, dead baby Dallas parents get soft landing
01:05 AM CST on Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Four years ago, I fielded an angry e-mail about my condemnation of a Dallas couple accused of battering their baby daughter to death.
The writer slapped me around for being unduly harsh, saying, "God has a forgiving heart, no matter what the situation is."
Dallas County must have a heck of a forgiving heart, too.
The parents - the prime and sole suspects of beating 3-month-old Tyreona Mabry so often and so savagely that death must have been a deliverance - walked out of court last week on terms too generous to be called a "slap on the wrist."
The mother and father, Tameika Hampton and Tremaine Mabry, both admitted causing the infant's injuries. In return, the charges against them were dramatically reduced and both received probation.
Rub your face in these facts, wallow in them, let them soak into your brain:
Here, in our ostensibly civilized city, a helpless little baby suffered 40 deliberately inflicted rib fractures, three leg fractures, chest contusions, facial bruises, bleeding in the brain and both eyeballs, a broken back, a bruised liver - and that's only what the autopsy found. She suffered more pain and terror during her 90-day life than most of us would in 90 years.
The people who have admitted they are responsible are sentenced to probation, as if they had shoplifted a turkey or bought a bag of dope.
How did this happen? Well, for one thing, politics.
The case had been investigated and was being prepared for trial when, in 2006, Craig Watkins was elected Dallas County DA. With a new administration, the veteran prosecutor who had been handling the case was pink-slipped, along with several other high-ranking members of the prior regime.
Because his new felony prosecutor had once represented Ms. Hampton on unrelated charges, Mr. Watkins properly recused his office from the case to avoid any conflict. In other words, a lot of the players changed.
"We had nothing to do with" the prosecution, Mr. Watkins told me. "When I read the newspaper, I was just as surprised as you are."
Last year, Judge Lena Levario appointed a special prosecutor in the case, Dallas criminal-defense lawyer Juan Sanchez.
Mr. Sanchez told me the case was too shaky to take before a jury because neither parent was willing to testify against the other.
"It's a rough case," he said Monday. "Both of them said, 'I didn't do it, and I don't know who did.' I had to make a tactical decision."
He said the police who originally investigated the case didn't give him enough to work with.
"I wish they would have separated [the parents] and interrogated them aggressively from the beginning," Mr. Sanchez said.
Under terms of the probation agreement, Judge Levario can now send either of the defendants to prison for even the most minor violation - an alternative, he said, that was better than risking an acquittal in a jury trial.
Not everybody agrees.
"It's a travesty of justice," said Patricia Hogue, the veteran child-abuse prosecutor who was fired when Mr. Watkins took office. She was preparing the case for trial when she left.
Ms. Hogue said she had been crafting a careful timetable that she believes would have proved that nobody besides the parents - one or both - could have caused Tyreona's fatal injuries.
As for their refusal to testify against one another, she said the case was indicted under Texas' law of parties, which says co-defendants share culpability in the commission of a capital crime even if it can't be proved which one actually committed the act.
Moreover, Ms. Hogue said, a detailed analysis of medical records gave added weight to the case against the parents. For example, she said, Tyreona's parents took her when she was 1 month old to an emergency room, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
At least one medical expert who reviewed those records, she said, was willing to testify that what appeared to be pneumonia was actually blood that had leaked into the baby's lungs as a result of internal injuries suffered in a beating.
Ms. Hogue said countless child-abuse cases are thus made, by piecing together medical evidence, timetables, witness statements.
She thinks there would have been a conviction, if not for capital murder, at least for a good stretch of prison time if an expert in child-abuse cases had been appointed to prosecute.
"I would have done it for free," she said.
Well, nobody in the justice system meant deliberate harm. Nobody said, "Let's let these baby killers go free."
But, through a series of missteps, political considerations, casual inattention and overlooked circumstances, Tyreona Mabry was tortured and abused in a manner we would not tolerate for enemy combatants, incarcerated prisoners or stray dogs.
And nobody is called to account.
Instead, Tameika Hampton (who, Mr. Sanchez said, no longer lives with Mr. Mabry) has had two more children, both now in the custody of other relatives, since being indicted on a capital murder charge in her baby's death.
Please excuse my incorrect self for saying that somebody needs to take this woman to the drugstore.
The baby herself, Tyreona, had a brief and hideous life that could be summed up in three words: Born. Beaten. Died.
She deserved better, says Beverly Levy, director of Dallas Court Appointed Special Advocates and a fierce champion for all those invisible children.
Ms. Levy was in the nearly deserted courtroom last week, where she read a victim-impact statement on the baby's behalf at Ms. Hampton's sentencing hearing.
"Our system failed this child over and over again, and we're acting as if she didn't exist," she said.
"She deserved justice, and we didn't give it to her."