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“A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality.” — Yoko Ono
Feb
8
Child Murder Trial Takes Another Disgusting Turn
Filed Under assholes, courts, misogyny, parenthood, patriarchy, violence against women and girls | Posted by Cara |
Remember Nixzmary Brown? The 7-year-old girl who was beaten to death by her stepfather, only to have his defense lawyer argue that the emaciated child who was regularly tied to a chair and forced to use a litter box as a restroom was “a little Houdini” who couldn’t be disciplined and apparently had it coming to her? As the trial wears on, it turns out that the story gets worse. Unsurprisingly, since it seems to me that the more horrifying and repulsive a story is, the more likely there are to be additional terrifying details still waiting to come to light.
As it turns out, even the outlandish and nauseating excuse that Nixzmary was being punished for eating a tub of yogurt while literally starving to death is a scientifically disprovable lie. The whole story is a sham, because by the time that the stepfather says the beating occurred, Nixzmary was already dead.
Seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown slipped into unconsciousness more than 13 hours before her stepfather and mother sought medical help for her, a medical examiner testified Thursday at her stepfather’s murder trial.
For more than seven hours of that time, the doctor said, Nixzmary was dead.
The timeline offered in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn by the medical examiner, Dr. Barbara A. Sampson, contrasts with the accounts that the stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, gave the authorities on Jan. 11, 2006, the day that Nixzmary’s body was found in her family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
In his written and videotaped statements, Mr. Rodriguez described an evening of shopping at Target on Jan. 10, followed by snacks for Nixzmary’s five siblings, a confrontation with Nixzmary over a container of yogurt or pudding that had disappeared, and another confrontation over a computer printer that Nixzmary confessed to jamming. This was followed, Mr. Rodriguez said, by a punishment session in which he beat Nixzmary, then held her head under a running tub faucet. When he left her naked on a bedroom floor, she was awake and moaning, he said.
According to Dr. Sampson, the city’s first chief deputy medical examiner, who presented the results of Nixzmary’s autopsy on Thursday, none of that could have happened when Mr. Rodriguez said it did.
Nixzmary, Dr. Sampson said, lost consciousness around 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, from a blow to the right side of her head sustained two days earlier.
“At least several hours before her death she was not receiving oxygen,” Dr. Sampson said, describing a microscopic exam of the girl’s brain cells.
“She was unconscious at least several hours before she ultimately died,” she said. Nixzmary died between 8 and 9 p.m., Dr. Sampson said.
This would make Mr. Rodriguez’s efforts to resuscitate Nixzmary — which he said he began briefly before sending his wife to summon help around 4 a.m. on Jan. 11 and was still doing when paramedics arrived — pointless, said Ama Dwimoh, the lead prosecutor.
“Cesar Rodriguez was doing C.P.R. on a dead body,” she said.
Here is what I know: when a man creates a story about beating his child, running her head under cold water and leaving her moaning and naked on her bedroom floor, when he says that all of this occurred because she ate a tub of yogurt while weighing half of a normal child her age and uses it as a defense over that child’s death, I’m not sure that I can handle knowing the truth.
But here is my personal theory. I think that when a man with such little conscience and connection to reality creates this story as an excuse for a deadly beating, he is actually the kind of man who abuses and tortures a small child for the fun of it. And sadly, the evidence seems to support such speculation.
Dr. Sampson said the blow inflicted Jan. 8 caused a subdural hematoma, or bleeding on and around Nixzmary’s brain.
[. . .]
Dr. Sampson said that Nixzmary, who weighed 36 pounds when she died, was killed both by the blow and by a history of starvation and abuse.
“The cause of death was child abuse syndrome, including blunt impact to the head with subdural hematoma,” she said. Child abuse syndrome, she explained, is a clinical term for prolonged physical abuse, malnutrition and neglect. “That subdural hematoma is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.
[. . .]
Dr. Sampson also said that Nixzmary’s two black eyes — huge raccoonlike circles surrounding the whole eye socket, photographs of which were shown to a tearful jury again on Thursday — were inflicted in the last few days of her life. Mr. Schwartz, noting that Ms. Santiago told investigators that Nixzmary sustained at least one black eye in late November when she fell after Ms. Santiago pushed her, has said that the black eyes shown in the photograph long predated Nixzmary’s death.
Dr. Sampson disputed that contention. “Black eyes that occurred six weeks ago would be gone,” she said.
In his videotaped statement, Mr. Rodriguez says of the black eyes, “she managed to do that to herself.”
First impressions would suggest that Rodriguez is a pathological liar and sociopath. But the defense isn’t arguing insanity or mental impairment of any kind. There’s no way that this could be an oversight on their part, because this defense team is willing to say anything — anything — to excuse the murder of a 7-year-old girl.
Mr. Schwartz told reporters outside the courtroom that Dr. Sampson’s version of events was not just at odds with the accounts of Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Santiago, but also at variance with the impression that the prosecution had elicited from its own witnesses as it presented its case. That testimony, based in part on Mr. Rodriguez’s statements, seemed not to question at least Mr. Rodriguez’s contention that Nixzmary was alive and well enough to misbehave on the night of Jan. 10.
“The pathologist’s testimony is disproving the people’s theory that this happened on January 10-11,” Mr. Schwartz said. “The whole setup has been shown by their own witness to be false.”
In her opening statement, though, Ms. Dwimoh was vague about the timeline, saying that the shopping trip to Target occurred on Jan. 9; that “hours later,” Mr. Rodriguez beat Nixzmary; and that after that, “hours later,” in the early hours of Jan. 11, her parents finally sought help.
[. . .]
Mr. Schwartz began his cross-examination of Dr. Sampson on Thursday by seeking, without success, to elicit the opinion that Nixzmary, who weighed only as much as a normal 4-year-old, was not dangerously underweight. His cross-examination is to continue on Friday.
In the last post, I called Schwartz a lot of ugly names. I stand behind all of them, but I’m also now at a point where I am simply terrified of the guy. He argues that evidence that Nixzmary died of starvation, severe beatings and internal bleeding around her brain disproves murder. And he seeks to elicit from a doctor that it is perfectly normal for a 7-year-old girl to weigh 36 lbs.
Everyone deserves a lawyer. But no one deserves a defense attorney who is willing to blatantly lie in court and argue why beating and starving a small to death is acceptable. No one deserves an attorney this willing to manipulate evidence. No one deserves an attorney who refers to a murdered child as a “little Houdini” because she managed to release herself of a chair that her stepfather tied her to. And I’m becoming increasingly convinced that an attorney who would do such things does not deserve the right to practice law. Yeah, Duke rape prosecutor Michael Nifong is an evil, unscrupulous man, but this guy? Eh. This is just a small murdered Latina girl we’re talking about, not adult white male athletes.
I don’t believe in the death penalty. But I do hope that the jury recognizes the transparency and vulgarity of Schwartz’s lies. And I hope that they lock up Rodriguez and throw away the key.
UPDATE: CNN has another article about the trial that focuses more on Schwartz’s tactics and the criticism of them. It also tells us that 10 women are on the jury — if both stereotypes and statistics hold true, this is surely a good thing in a trial involving the murder of a child. At least, a good thing for those of us wanting a conviction.
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“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” — Susan B. Anthony
God, that was even harder to stomach than the last post on this story. Has anyone contacted the state bar on this Schwartz guy? Can an outside party do that in the US?
Since I haven’t been in court watching this trial, I can’t say that I know WHY Schwartz is acting as he is, BUT…
I have seen trials with extremely unsympathetic defendants (thinking here of a man who was convicted of repeatedly anally raping his two granddaughters over the course of several years) where defense attorneys have acted like this. It doesn’t work with the jury, but it covers the lawyer against a malpractice suit from the defendant after he gets convicted, since the lawyer sure looks like he went to bat for his client. That may be what’s happening here.
“It doesn’t work with the jury, but it covers the lawyer against a malpractice suit from the defendant after he gets convicted”
I don’t think that defendants can sue their attorneys*, however they can appeal their case on the grounds of ineffective counsel. I don’t know how often that works, but they can try it. With a lawyer like this though, I doubt it would work. So paradoxically the worse he seems in court in his defense, the more likely the guy will remain in jail after his sentence and not receive an appeal, which would be good.
Once I was watching a trial on CourtTV of a woman who had killed her abusive husband and left the body in the main bedroom of their trailer for months. She claimed she feared for her life and the life of the child she was pregnant with at the time. She testified that her husband had kicked her in the stomach. The prosecutor brought up the fact that she had been kicked in the stomach during a previous pregnancy, and wasn’t that child born healthy? Yup, he suggested that kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach wasn’t cause for concern. And the defense didn’t even object! I was fuming for about a week after that.
*I could be wrong
you can sue your attorney for malpractice. it won’t get you out of jail, but it will be a major pain in the ass for your attorney and cost him time and money to defend.
not saying that’s what this guy is doing, but it might be. playing CYA against a claim of ineffective cousel isn’t as likely, because those are HARD to win (cause the result is your conviction gets thrown out. with malpractice, you stay in jail but you get money).
Re:
I don’t believe there’s any state where sociopathy/psychopathy/Antisocial Personality Disorder is considered “insanity” for legal purposes.
Really? Huh.
I can barely imagine what the jury must be going through emotionally when hearing all of this. Just by reading your post and the link to the CNN story I’m in tears.
i can’t even get through this whole thing w/o tearing up. people are sick. people can even fool themselves in to believing they have done nothing wrong and will try to make others doubt themselves for not believing it.
i don’t know how the jury is getting through this.
how is it that this case is taking so long?
A large part of the problem is that many if not most parents see their children as property, not people – it starts with “you can’t tell me how to discipline MY child” and ends with what happened to Judith Barsi and Samantha Ritchie.
Cara -
In the courts, insanity is based on whether or not the person who committed the crime knew that what they were doing was wrong. Sociopaths etc know that they are doing something wrong, they just don’t care, or feel entitled, or whatever.
Well there you go. You learn something new everyday.
[...] have previously written about the horrific crime that was Nixzmary Brown’s murder. Her killer and stepfather Cesar Rodriguez got the maximum sentence [...]