The below certainly seems to support Lisa's position. Are we getting worse, or was the British nanny judge selectively citing law, I wonder.
<quote> [from de-news, a German news digest]
- 15 year jail sentence for German au pair Manuela Etzel
Washington. German au pair Manuela Etzel has been sentenced to 15 years
imprisonment in the United States. She was found guilty of manslaughter in
connection with the death of an 18 month old girl. The judge went three
years beyond the normal maximum sentence. As justification, he said the
accused had dropped the little girl at a church kindergarten in a
particularly reckless manner. Etzel maintained it was never her intention
to hurt the child.
<endquote>
>
> On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Liza Featherstone wrote:
>
> > Agreed that Singer's view is *very* unlikely ever to get anywhere near the
> > U.S. mainstream. Americans actually tend to be a lot more horrified by
> > infanticide than many other cultures; in Britain, I think, baby-killing is
> > generally prosecuted as manslaughter, hardly ever as murder (Brits on the
> > list correct me if I'm wrong).
And I wrote
>
> Agreed that we say we're horrified in the papers. But in the coverage
> surrounding the nanny case, I thought I remembered being surprised to read
> that low sentences were the norm for baby killers in the US -- and that
> the sentence given the British nanny was in line with that norm. I think
> the figures were given by the judge in the course of justifying his
> actionn and recycled without demur by mainstream papers.
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com