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| 5/24 |
| 2005/7/6 [Politics/Domestic/Crime] UID:38433 Activity:high |
7/6 Every year, Americans vacationers disappear in foreign land like
Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, etc. Why is the Holloway case
so much more visible on news? Why is Natalie Holloway so special?
\_ Timing. It's the "Where the White Women at?" network news.
DeLay's in trouble! Find me a kidnapping!
\_ Its not a conspiracy. Just a good ol' American mix of racism
and prurience.
\_ It isn't journalism, and it's putting their ratings in the
toilet. There has to be some sort of impetus for it.
\_ Are you talking about Fox? In their case, they just don't
want to cover Iraq anymore. Can't imagine why.
\_ It's all of them. They spend more time on MJ and the
latest missing woman than on our federal government,
foreign affairs, local affairs, even sports...
\_ http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/7/3/491/18474
\_ i don't think that many disappear, non english grammar
troll
\_ Cute white blonde chick kidnapped by black guys. You figure it out.
\_ Same for the Laci Peterson case -- husbands kill wifes in America
\_ http://www.wrongsideoftown.com
\_ NSFW, duh.
\_ Same for the Laci Peterson case -- husbands kill wives in America
all the time, but this one got the media's and people's attention.
\_ The Peterson case got a lot of attention because of the
"prosecuting him for the death of the unborn" angle. That
set an interesting precedent.
\_ The Peterson case didn't set any precedent; the treatment of
murderers of pregnant women is well-established.
\_ I am pretty sure this is the first conviction in
California for killing an unborn fetus.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/26/ctv.fetal.homicide
\_ And it was an 8-mo. pregnant woman who went missing on
Christmas Eve, etc.
\_ wow. I've self-filtered my news-sources pretty well. I've never
heard of her until this. -nivra |
| 5/24 |
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| www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/7/3/491/18474 If you follow the news media in the United States, particular the 24-hour cable stations, it certainly ought to. On the other hand, if you've bee n living in a cave for the past month or so, here are the highlights: Na talee Holloway is an 18 year-old girl from Alabama who vanished on May 3 0th from the island of Aruba, where she was vacationing with some of her classmates to celebrate their high school graduation. Based on the amou nt of coverage that this story has received from the national media (Fox News in particular), one must draw the conclusion that this is a Very I mportant Issue, and that all Americans should care very deeply and perso nally about it. Now, before I get called a heartless bastard, let me hasten to point out that I agree that this story is tragic. Natalee's family and friends hav e doubtless been going through hell during this past month. I do hope th at she can be recovered safe and sound, though that possibility seems ve ry remote at this point. If I were the King of the World, I would snap m y fingers and instantly transport every missing person back to the safet y of their families. But what makes Natalee Holloway more important than, say, Reyna Alvarado- Carerra? In the United States alone, more than a million people are reported missi ng each year. The majority o f those cases are runaways, but there are also significant numbers of ab ductions at the hands of both relatives and strangers. I certainly hadn't until I started doing research for this story. Reyna i s a 13 year-old Hispanic girl who is believed to have been abducted by a stranger in Norcross, Georgia. A Google search on her name yields a grand total of 6 results . The same search for "Natalee Holloway" turns up 276,000 results. But Natalee doesn't just get more Google search results. As I mentioned in the intro, American news outlets are awas h with a veritable cornucopia of Natalee fever. She also gets assistance from the Dutch Marines and special agents of the Federal Bureau of Inve stigation, who apparently already have enough resources at work battling mundane things like terrorism. three F-16 warplanes to assist in the search for Natalee. I was give n pause by thinking about the sheer cost of this endeavor. My brother-in -law is a recruiter for the Air National Guard, and I have a rough idea of how much money it costs to even get one of those things off of the gr ound. How much do you suppose is being spent to equip these planes with the special search equipment and then actually get them to Aruba? The disproportionate response of Aruban, Dutch, and American authorities to the disappearance of this girl can only be attributed to the dispropo rtionate amount of media coverage. CNN, MSNBC, and (especially) Fox News feature hourly updates on the status of the investigation. They intervi ew family members, law enforcement personnel, and representatives of the Aruban government. The case even features prominently on right-wing tal k radio shows, such as the Sean Hannity Show and Bill O'Reilly's Radio F actor. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the coverage: What could possibly be political about this case? Why would Hannity and O'Re illy be interested in taking away airtime from discussions about the imm orality of Democrats and spend it on Natalee Holloway instead? I can guess, and will spend the next couple of paragraphs doing so. The initial Fox News coverage of the story was pretty transparent, partic ularly on O'Reilly's show. The incident was portrayed as a lesson: "See, this is what happens when you vacation outside of America in nations wi th swarthy peoples." Initially, two former security guards were arrested in connection with the disappearance. O'Reilly called these two men "sl ugs" and lamented the fact that Aruba does not have a death penalty that they could be threatened with. Of course, it later turned out that the two had nothing to do with the abduction, and they were released. Since the new culprit was now Whitey, th e initial political spin was invalidated. ") This f izzled, however, and the current focus of the coverage, at least on Fox, is the supposed ineptitude of Aruban law enforcement. O'Reilly's new fa vorite pastime is lambasting the Aruban authorities for not giving the m edia enough information about the case and for not having recovered her body yet. The coverag e at places like CNN and MSNBC has been less political but certainly no less pervasive. Stories of actual importance to the daily lives of Ameri cans are routinely ignored in favor of the latest non-updates in the Hol loway case. It would probably be impossible to figure out how many millions of dollar s are being spent on the effort to find Natalee Holloway. But I'll wager it would be relatively trivial to determine how much money and effort i s expended on a typical abducted person case. So if you've reserved a fe w moments out of your day to send your thoughts or prayers to the family of Natalee Holloway, you might want to do the same to the family of Rey na Alvarado-Carerra. Is America, as a nation, well -served by a news media that is more concerned with infotainment than it is with information? And if you think that the Natalee Holloway case is something that in any shape or form deserves my hourly attention, could you explain why? Polo555 on Wed Jul 6th, 2005 at 01:49:17 PM EST I cannot believe you people. This is not the first time that a young girl from the United States has come up missing in Aruba while vacationing. She went missing in 1995 and believed to h ave been sold. There is something odd going on in Aruba and thanks to th e Holloway case getting so much attention it will come to a stop. I don' t know about you but I don't want to be scared shitless every time I go on vacation. And do you really thank that she is getting so much attenti on because she is white and wealthy? So I read the sto ry and I agreed mostly and then brought it up for morning coffee discuss ion with my co-workers. We all seem to agree and had various theories about why this one girl see med to be getting all the attention while millions of other kids are ign ored. One of my co-workers stated that it was how loudly the parents scr eamed and brought attention to the case. His arguement was that to get o n the news you have to make a big fuss. Now, I disagreed, but this led t o an idea, an all-american idea at that ... Why don't the par ents, or hell, anyone interested, sue the major news companies for predj udice (or whatever you can come up with)? You likely would not win, but you certainly would gain attention and that's really the point, to get m ore people to pay attention so that someone, somewhere might recognize o ne of these children. This just seemed like such an excellent idea to draw attention to the oth er missing children that I thought I would post it and see what others t hought. I think we would be much better served by news companies if, ins tead of the latest news of Jacko going to another country so he can fond le little boys in peace, every hour or so they ran pics from all the cur rent Amber Alerts or something to that effect. I know, it's a utopian idea, how would you force people to watch it? Ther e are plenty of holes in this idea, but I'm really surprised that noone has tried it yet. actually, just sue anytime, it' s the American Waytm --- I stab people. mahju on Wed Jul 6th, 2005 at 08:58:43 AM EST Last night I watched CSI - Mimi (Death Grip Series 2 - Episode 4 of 24). Interestingly in this episode a rich white girl goes missing and there is a huge response. She later found to be fine and just run away, while in their investigations they find the missing body of a hispanic girl, whi ch went unmentioned in the press, and with little previous help by polic e Towards the end on of the cast says "if she had blonde hair and blue eyes, this wouldn't have happend". I guess that's a life imitating ar t type moments Welcome to America... devanhoe at gmail) Where all major media news organizations read from the same news feed. Where major media news organizations cant tell the difference between a r eal news feed, and government sponsor... |
| www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/26/ctv.fetal.homicide -> www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/26/ctv.fetal.homicide/ Court TV Laci Peterson Laci Peterson Story Tools (Court TV) -- Teresa Keeler was eight months pregnant on the winter day i n 1969 when her ex-husband attacked her. Robert Keeler, whom she had div orced the previous fall, blocked the path of her car on a narrow mountai n road near Stockton, California, and asked her if she was expecting a c hild by her new lover, Ernest Vogt. When she ignored the question, he pu lled her from the vehicle and seeing her swollen belly, said, "I'm going to stomp it out of you." He kneed her in the abdomen and then beat her unconscious. Her head was severely fractured fr om the blow to Teresa Keeler's stomach. That assault three decades ago paved the way for a law against fetal homi cide that may be applied in the case of Laci Peterson, the Modesto woman who vanished in December when she was seven months pregnant. Police rec ently reclassified the missing person case as a homicide investigation, and a spokeswoman for the local prosecutor's office said the district at torney generally charges two counts of murder when a pregnant woman is k illed. "If both the woman and the child were killed and we can prove the child w as killed due to the actions of the perpetrator, then we charge both," s aid Stanislaus County Assistant District Attorney Carol Shipley. In Robert Keeler's case, prosecutors tried to charge him with the murder of "Baby Girl Vogt" along with the beating of his ex-wife. But the California Supreme Court threw out the charge, say ing that a fetus was not a human being and therefore could not be murder ed under the statute. According to a long tradition of common law, the j ustices said, only someone "born alive" could be killed. A public outcry followed and the state legislature amended the murder sta tute to include the killing of a fetus. Later, the state Supreme Court s tepped in again and ruled that murder charges can only apply to fetuses older than seven weeks, or beyond the embryonic stage. There are fetal homicide laws on the books in more than two dozen states, but they vary widely. In some states, such as Missouri and Minnesota, a fetus is considered a living thing at conception. In others, like Georg ia and Michigan, a fetus is only protected after "quickening" when move ment is first felt in the womb occurs. In Pennsylvania, where a woman was convicted Wednesday of murder for caus ing a romantic rival to miscarry her 15-week-old fetus, the 1999 law app lies to any stage of pregnancy. Passage of the laws is a key battleground in the abortion wars. Opponents push for the statutes as a way to establish within the law that fetuses are living beings with rights. Although the statutes make clear exclusi ons for legal abortions, anti-abortion activists believe the laws, in ad dition to punishing outrageous acts of violence, affect the public's per ception of abortion. "It's a tool to educate the public as to the value of a human life," said Denise Burke, staff counsel for the anti-abortion organization American s United for Life. Abortion rights groups have fought the laws, arguing that there are ways to toughen penalties for perpetrators without undermining Roe v Wade, t he US Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. Sondra Goldsche in of the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project, cited a North Carolina provision that adds to the length of a prison se ntence for assault if it causes a miscarriage. "That way you are able to recognize the real victim, who is a woman who h as experienced the devastating loss of a wanted pregnancy, without besto wing independent rights on a fetus," said Goldschein. Although North Carolina does not have a fetal homicide law, it does have laws providing punishment for harming a fetus. Former pro football playe r Rae Carruth, convicted of plotting the murder of his pregnant girlfrie nd, was also found guilty of "using an instrument with intent to destroy an unborn child." His girlfriend eventually died from gunshot wounds, b ut her baby was delivered by Caesarean section 10 weeks early and surviv ed. In spite of opposition from abortion rights groups, such laws and bills a re increasingly common. Last year, Idaho and Nebraska enacted new statut es and Congress is expected to reconsider a fetal homicide bill entitled "Unborn Victims of Violence Act." The House of Representatives passed t he bill in its last session. Debating a law for fetuses As in the Keeler case in California, new state laws usually come on the h eels of a high-profile case that causes public outrage. Kentucky, a stat e with no fetal homicide law, is considering such a statute following th e death of Veronica Jane Thornsbury. The 22-year-old was in labor and being driven to a hospital in March 2001 when a drug-addled driver plowed his pick-up through a red light and sm ashed into her car. Thornsbury was killed and the fetus was stillborn, a nd prosecutors charged two counts of murder. The state's Court of Appeals ruled that since Thornsbury's child never dr ew a breath, the second murder charge was inappropriate. Her case was ci ted often last month as state legislators began debating a fetal homicid e law. In a similar case in New York, which has no fetal homicide law, a police officer named Joseph Gray ran over a pregnant woman and two relatives. Doctors delivered the baby, but it died after 12 h ours on life support. Queens prosecutors originally charged three counts of manslaughter, sayin g that because the coroner listed the baby as stillborn, he had not been "born alive" and could not be a manslaughter victim. The baby's father protested that the baby's heart beat independently for close to an hour after life support was removed. Prosecutors relented, and Gray was convi cted of four counts of manslaughter. In Peterson's case, the fetal murder statute could lead to a capital case . Under California law, anyone charged with multiple murders is eligible for the death penalty. Prosecutors must prove that the perpetrator had the intent to kill the fetus or at least knew that the death would resul t from the mother's killing. It seems unlikely that anyone could not kno w that Laci Peterson, less than two months from full-term, was pregnant. But prosecutor Shipley said a double murder charge is far from a certaint y She pointed to speculation that Peterson was abducted by someone who planned to steal her baby. |
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