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http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/john-andrew-welden-faces-sentencing-in-tampa-abortion-pill-case/2162858
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2547135/Fertility-doctors-son-gave-girlfriend-pill-woman-sentenced-14-years-jail.html

You can find more just googling John Welden case. I didn't quote either article as they are both much too long.

John Welden of Tampa, Florida gave his ex-girlfriend Remee Jo Lee pills and told her they were antibiotics - but they induced an abortion
He gave her the pills 'because he was worried about his other girlfriend finding out about the pregnancy'
Welden's father is prominent Tampa fertility doc Dr. Stephen Welden, whose signature Welden forged to get the drugs

Edit:

My cliffs: Guy knocks up stripper. Guy has girlfriend. Guy doesn't want girlfriend to find out. Guy gets drugs by forging daddy's signature and slips them to stripper. Pregnancy is terminated. The potential mother is pissed. Guy goes to jail.

He deserves to be punished, but I do question the length of the sentence. It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

14 years strikes me as about right for what is, basically, premeditated murder.

It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

Well, the big difference is whether the person carrying the baby wants to carry it to full term.

14 years means that he'll become an actual hardened criminal (as opposed to a coward who slipped a pregnant woman a pill to give her an abortion), and then be released, with minimal employment prospects. What are the odds that he'll serve as a functioning member of society?

I don't feel bad for him in this scenario, but I feel bad for society.

 sebster wrote:
14 years strikes me as about right for what is, basically, premeditated murder.

It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

Well, the big difference is whether the person carrying the baby wants to carry it to full term.

Wait, so killing a fetus is premeditated murder, except when the person carrying it wants to kill it herself?

 Seaward wrote:
Wait, so killing a fetus is premeditated murder, except when the person carrying it wants to kill it herself?

Yes, the intent of the mother in whether she plans to bring that child to term or not matters. How is this news?

 sebster wrote:
Yes, the intent of the mother in whether she plans to bring that child to term or not matters. How is this news?

It would seem to take a great deal of cognitive dissonance to suggest that one case meets the definition of homicide - the killing of a human by a human - and the other does not. Unless it's Schrodinger's fetus, both a human and not a human at the same time.

 Seaward wrote:
Wait, so killing a fetus is premeditated murder, except when the person carrying it wants to kill it herself?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction

Obviously it isn't the same, but the simplest way to represent the massive harm done by forcing an abortion on someone who doesn't want it (or killing a pregnant woman, etc) is to pretend that the fetus is a full person so that a harsher sentence is justified.

 Seaward wrote:

 sebster wrote:
Yes, the intent of the mother in whether she plans to bring that child to term or not matters. How is this news?

It would seem to take a great deal of cognitive dissonance to suggest that one case meets the definition of homicide - the killing of a human by a human - and the other does not. Unless it's Schrodinger's fetus, both a human and not a human at the same time.

LOL @ Schrödinger's fetus!

I got the impression that in Common Law countries, the legal part of the discussion hinges more or less exclusively on the "reproductive rights" of the female instead of the fetus' status. (If I'm wrong here, someone please correct me.)

This leads to the construction of abortion being a female exercising her reproductive rights. If a third party causes that abortion without her consent, the reproductive rights of the female were violated. Said violation is then treated LIKE homicide.

As a lawyer from outside the Common Law zone, I find this reasoning a little bewildering, but purely logically, I can get behind it.

I agree it's illogical to consider abortion murder or not depending on circumstances. The administration of the pill could be considered an assault and/or poisoning of the mother, though.

He wasn't prosecuted for murder, however, or for an assault or poisoning.

one of the news articles wrote:Lazzara sentenced him to 13 years and eight months — likely to be served in a minimum-security work camp — on charges of product tampering and conspiracy to commit mail fraud.

Apparently there is a law about tampering with foetuses, the "Unborn Victims of Violence Act" which probably designed to stop women having abortions. This was invoked at first but he did a deal and got the other crimes instead.

Which, for me, is the really astonishing part of that trial. Almost 14 years for "product tampering and conspiracy to commit mail fraud", because they wanted to sentence him for something else, but in order to cut corners they allowed him to walk away with the lesser offences.

I will never get this "deal" culture of yours.

I assume that if they had prosecuted him for Murder 1 and he'd been convicted it would have given anti-abortionists something to work with. So there is that.

Which really shouldn't be the concern of the court at all. The social consequences are an issue the legislative body has to handle.

Plea bargaining is incredibly silly.


I don't think he deserved 14 years though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Allod wrote:
Which really shouldn't be the concern of the court at all. The social consequences are an issue the legislative body has to handle.

Can tell that you are not from a common law country The courts create their own legislation which can only be overridden by Parliament.

Trying to get anything about abortions through a legislative body is an absolute nightmare.

If he'd pushed the lady down the stairs to cause her to miscarry, would he have deserved 14 years then?

Damn right he deserves 14 years.

 welshhoppo wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Allod wrote:
Which really shouldn't be the concern of the court at all. The social consequences are an issue the legislative body has to handle.

Can tell that you are not from a common law country The courts create their own legislation which can only be overridden by Parliament.

Well, to be fair, I don't think that's a bad way to go about it. It's more that external factors like "will this sentence be utilized by group X to further their political agenda" should still play no part in a trial, no matter if it's situated in a Common Law country or not.

He deserves to be punished, but I do question the length of the sentence. It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

it does doesn't it.

That isn't the case here, though, as explained earlier.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
It seems the Unborn Victims of Violence Act specifically exempts abortion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unborn_Victims_of_Violence_Act

What a douche. 14 years sounds okay to me. Forging signatures which could potentially get his dad in trouble, those pills aren't good for people: they essentially flush a woman's system hardcore, he cheated on his current gf, and prevented a kid from seeing the world. 14 doesn't sound too long to me.

 Seaward wrote:

 sebster wrote:
14 years strikes me as about right for what is, basically, premeditated murder.

It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

Well, the big difference is whether the person carrying the baby wants to carry it to full term.

Wait, so killing a fetus is premeditated murder, except when the person carrying it wants to kill it herself?

In the words of the Immortal Bard: "How do you say...Bingo? Bingo!"


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
If he'd pushed the lady down the stairs to cause her to miscarry, would he have deserved 14 years then?

Damn right he deserves 14 years.

This falls under the heading of: "if you're a dick, sometimes Karma gets you. " yea Karma

 Seaward wrote:

 sebster wrote:
Yes, the intent of the mother in whether she plans to bring that child to term or not matters. How is this news?

It would seem to take a great deal of cognitive dissonance to suggest that one case meets the definition of homicide - the killing of a human by a human - and the other does not. Unless it's Schrodinger's fetus, both a human and not a human at the same time.

Well, in no jursidiction is forced termination considered homicide. In fact, there are few if any areas of the law that treat fetuses as "persons."

Still, the legal principles behind criminilized termination and legalized abortion aren't complicated, they are just controversial. At its core, much of the law deals with competting or conflicting rights, be they civil rights, property rights, so on. Even the criminal code is our way of regulating the conflict between a person's right to do as they please, and the right of others to live in peace.

Both laws (legaized abortion and criminilized termination) arise from the same theory: that a woman has a right to control her reproductive autonomy. There is also the right of the state to protect the fetus, for while it is not a person, it is clealry something. To take away a woman's right to be pregnant, through forced termination, is both wrong, and criminal when the state finds the fetus to be protected. However, our current jurisprudence holds that a woman has a right to not be pregnant, and to therefore terminate her own pregnancy. While the state also has the right to protect that fetus, even from its own mother, that right is not always strong enough.

You can see the same general principles in definiations of "crimes against humanity," which list both forced pregnancy and forced abortion.


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 trexmeyer wrote:
It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

Well, judges aren't robots, and some have their own perspectives. this is a case out of tampa florida, which would probably criminilized abortion in a nano-second if they could. So, to this judge, and likely to any jury, the guy did commit murder.

Really, the bigger problem here is that he commited forgery as part of this. This may not be murder, but it's premediatated poisoning, which is harsly punished as a rule.

 trexmeyer wrote:
It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

Welcome to US Law, where the same crime can either get you life in prison or a 2 year suspended sentence based on the judge, jury, prosecutor, defense attorney, the breakfast served to the sequestered jury, the amount of media involved, and so on.

 kronk wrote:

 trexmeyer wrote:
It is strange to me how the fetus' status as a human being or not seems to fluctuate on a case by case basis.

Welcome to US Law, where the same crime can either get you life in prison or a 2 year suspended sentence based on the judge, jury, prosecutor, defense attorney, the breakfast served to the sequestered jury, the amount of media involved, and so on.

Very few crimes are the same. They might be prosecuted under the same statute, but things get more complicated in a hurry.

Would you be more comfortable if there was no flexibliity for aggravating or mitigating circumstances?

 Polonius wrote:

Would you be more comfortable if there was no flexibliity for aggravating or mitigating circumstances?

Nope. I'm not complaining. I'm just pointing out that even 1st degree murder can get you an entire range of punishments based on an entire range of circumstances.

And by circumstances, you mean the jury makeup...

 kronk wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

Would you be more comfortable if there was no flexibliity for aggravating or mitigating circumstances?

Nope. I'm not complaining. I'm just pointing out that even 1st degree murder can get you an entire range of punishments based on an entire range of circumstances.

Yeah, some of that is a good thing, some isn't. In the end, it's a matter of discretion, and that will often lead to abuses, but its generally better than a rigid system.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
He wasn't prosecuted for murder, however, or for an assault or poisoning.

Oh, I know. I was responding to sebster's assertion that what the guy did amounts to premeditated murder. It clearly doesn't, if you're pro-choice, and clearly does, if you're pro-life. You can't really have it both ways.

In the US, our laws are created and interpreted by lots of different people with competing interests. The resulting melange is a compromise that must then be rationalized by subsequent interpreters; but it's a mistake to pretend all of these principles flow from the same ethical (or even logical) perspective. It's a puzzle where we pretend to recognize the picture after hammering the misfit pieces together.

@Seaward: Pfft, you and your logic!

Should have been a fine - he didn't kill anything.

Well, that's just incorrect. He killed the developing embryo.

Whether said embryo gets the protection of law, or whether it counts as a "person" is up for debate, but it is certainly a living thing with a unique genetic code.