Word: jailings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...supporters, including Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot and the National Organization for Women, she is Mother Courage personified. Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, 42, a plastic surgeon, has spent two years in jail -- without benefit of trial -- for civil contempt of court. Her offense: refusing to disclose the whereabouts of her daughter Hilary, now 7, to Washington Judge Herbert B. Dixon Jr., who had ordered unsupervised visits with her ex-husband, oral surgeon Eric Foretich, 46, whom Morgan charges with sexually abusing the child...
...invented the rape charges out of malice against Foretich; her defiance of Dixon's order, they argue, is a sign of obsession, not maternal devotion. To ethicists and legal scholars, the case raises some troubling questions: Should there be time limits on a judge's right to jail a person for civil contempt? Does a parent, where suspicions of sexual abuse exist, have a moral right to defy the courts to protect a child...
Morgan's ordeal should soon be coming to an end. Last week the Senate passed a bill that sets a one-year limit on the length of time an individual in a child-custody case can be jailed for civil contempt in the District of Columbia without facing trial for criminal contempt. Morgan could be freed once the Senate bill is reconciled with somewhat broader legislation previously passed by the House. Meanwhile, on Sept. 20, the full District of Columbia Appeals Court is set to hear oral arguments on a ruling last month by a three-member panel...
Morgan, however, has no doubts as to the rightness of her actions. "For the average middle-class American," she told TIME last week, "living in the D.C. jail is a horror. It's dirty, it's noisy, it's crowded, and you have no privacy. But I chose this because the middle-class American existence is worthless to me if my daughter is being raped. The destruction of my child is not worth any possessions. Just having her safe makes me happy...
China's authorities have been quick to brand as "counterrevolutionaries" students and workers who voiced far subtler sentiments, shipping them off to jail, or worse. What was so intriguing about this book, published last May, was that its author was the official Communist Youth League committee in Mao Zedong's home province of Hunan, and that copies were circulating more than three months after the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Youth League officials in Beijing claimed not to know anything about the tract's origins, but they said the case was "under investigation." Said a Western diplomat: "The language is strongly...