Word: edelin
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...district attorney's staff had backed up its indictment through the six-week trial with merely an emotional invitation to the jurors to use their "common sense," to imagine that the letus Kenneth Edelin removed from the woman's womb had been a "baby boy," gasping for breath Still. If was clear what Flanagan was charging Edelin with, when in his bellicose closing to the jury, he employed the language of the anti abortion movement...
...saddest aspects of this case is that the jurors responded in kind. Perhaps perplexed by the weights and cerebral evidence in Edelin's defense, this collection of white, mostly Catholic Bostonians accepted Flanagan's graphic if inaccurate portrait of the "victim," statements from the jurors have indicated. Not even the three days of jury selection that preceded this trial could eliminate anti-abortion sentiment from the panel. Another parochial sensibility was apparently active in their considerations. Even if Edelin is no killer, he is black. One juror quoted another as saying. "That nigger is guilty as sin." Apparently, some...
...jury's failure in the Edelin decision is not grounds for an argument against the jury system. Clearly, this case never should have made it to that stage at all. This was a case where both sides argued over uncertain points of law that should have been defined from the outset; at what age is a prematurely delivered fetus considered capable of life apart from the mother? What degree of separation from the mother constitutes birth? What is manslaughter? And even, what is abortion? The attorneys spent most of the six-week trial arguing not about the circumstances...
...five minutes Friday morning, during a one and a half hour discussion of the duties of a jury, the judge addressed these questions finally. What McGuire should have done then was to conclude that Edelin was innocent--in light of his definition of birth as the separation of the fetus from the mother and in light of the overwhelming evidence from both prosecution and defense that the fetus was dead when it was removed from the womb. McGuire did not acquit Edelin, unfortunately, but gave those definitions to the jury. Inevitably, the recollection of those five minutes from the judge...
...prosecution desired when it brought the indictment last April, of intimidating those who perform legal abortions. Still, as a thousand supporters demonstrated Monday, there is much to be hoped after all this: That a higher court will reverse the decision on the grounds that no state statute warned Edelin that the operation he undertook was culpable. Or that the state Board of Registration in Medicine will uphold Edelin's actions by refusing to revoke his license. Or that a higher court will issue a ruling that defines abortion and the age of viability in such a manner that doctors...