Word: victimized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Joshua DeShaney is paralyzed and profoundly retarded, the victim of brutal pummelings at age four by his father. Joshua, now nine, is also the victim of inaction by Wisconsin's Winnebago County department of social services. The agency failed to remove the child from his divorced father's custody despite continual reports of abuse for nearly two years, repeated hospitalizations for serious injuries, and regular observations by a caseworker of suspicious bumps and lesions. Joshua's father was convicted of child abuse in 1984 and paroled from prison after less than two years. Last week, in a ruling that stunned...
...state's failure to protect an individual against private violence," declared Chief Justice William Rehnquist, was not a denial of the victim's constitutional rights. "While the state may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced in the free world, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him any more vulnerable to them." The majority's ruling provoked an emotional dissent from Justice Harry Blackmun. "Poor Joshua! Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly and intemperate father, and abandoned by ((county officials)) who placed him in a dangerous predicament...
...came up from the tropical slums to outsmart New York, and with all the rules crumbling here as elsewhere, so that nobody could any longer be clear in his mind about anything, they could do it." But Clara is here ruminating in anger and the natural resentment of a victim. In calmer moods, she can recall listening to Teddy Regler talk about the decline of civilization and privately disagreeing: "I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing-culture bit: I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul...
...MacDonald denies the litany of charges lodged at his mahogany door. He claims that the testimony in Washington is unsubstantiated and unfair and that he is the victim of an attempt to divert attention from mismanagement...
...unusual practice, all of yesterday's proceedings took place at the judge's bar or in his chambers. The procedures were requested by defense attorney Milly A. Whatley because the victim's identification of the suspect is expected to be an important issue in the case, Lynch said...