Assistant District Attorneys Joanne Pescatore and Christine Wechsler confirmed that the death penalty is under review for former Gosnell employees Lynda Williams, 42, of Wilmington; Steven Massof, 48, of Pittsburgh; and Adrienne Moton, 33, of Upper Darby.
All three are accused of aiding Gosnell in seven abortions in which infants were born live and viable - and then allegedly killed by the 70-year-old physician.
.... Prosecutors officially notified defense attorney Jack McMahon that they will seek death by lethal injection if a jury finds Gosnell guilty of first-degree murder in the abortions that took place at his Women's Medical Society clinic at 3801 Lancaster Ave.
I am probably nearly as astonished as Kermit Gosnell is himself that he is being so vigorously prosecuted for what he was doing. Anybody who has paid close attention to abortion practice in America knows that Gosnell’s crimes were far from unique, and that he would have had absolutely no reason to believe that he would be on trial for his life.
Yes, to the average layman, it’s glaringly obvious that the things that went on in that clinic were appalling and inexcusable. But Kermit Gosnell was not an ordinary layman. He was part of the inner workings of abortion in America, and they operate in a different world.
Perhaps the best way to explain this to a jury would be to recall the Millgram Experiment, in which ordinary volunteers administered what they were made to believe were fatal electric shocks to other volunteers. The presence of an authority figure reassuring the participants that their actions were acceptable overrode ordinary compassion and common sense.
The moral authorities to whom Kermit Gosnell would look were doing nothing but reassuring him of the justice of his practices:
Every authority figure in Kermit Gosnell’s moral universe held that the right to abortion was absolute, and that to so much as question the woman’s commitment to going through with the procedure was “condescending” and evil. And this holding of the right to abortion as absolute extended past the birth of the child, as long as the effort to end the child’s life began while he or she was still in the uterus.
I have provided on this blog and elsewhere an abundance of examples of filthy abortion mills, unqualified staff administering general anesthesia, live babies being killed or left to die, and patients killed by carelessness, which didn’t even shut down a clinic temporarily or result in the loss of a medical license. That Kermit Gosnell is to be tried for his life for doing what our society has relegated to being entirely at his own discretion is inexcusable.
That his employees -- who had not only those moral authorities but Gosnell himself reassuring them that they were doing right -- should face the death penalty is staggering.
In normal society, routinely murdering infants for money would indeed be a capital crime. But the seedy abortion underbelly we have permitted to thrive is not a normal society. It's a death machine, lauded and supported up to and including the President and the Supreme Court.
We created this monster. We have no business taking out our own guilt on him.
This case could very well be the linchpin for overturning Roe V Wade. You make some excellent points, but imagine for a moment the deterrent effect the death penalty would have on the abortion lobby. I also think the women who paid him and his hitmen should be up on charges too. If we're going to make late term abortion illegal, that illegality should extend to all parties involved. Just my opinion.
ReplyDeleteYou're not going to get me to back the death penalty on this case if only because Gosnell and his party can be kept from killing again by just keeping them locked up. They're not going to be violent in prison, or order hits, or be an escape risk.
ReplyDeleteWith the women you'd have a hard time proving she KNEW it was a baby. The abortionist of course knows it is, but if they woman's been lied to, she might believe the crap about just "removing tissue."