Court lets S.C. murder conviction stand
Woman who used drug in pregnancy is serving 12 years
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court refused yesterday to interfere with the nation's first murder conviction of a woman for taking an illegal drug during pregnancy, a case in which prosecutors argued that cocaine use caused the baby to be stillborn.
The brief order, which offered no explanation, kept the court out of a medical and scientific debate over the causes of stillbirth, but left the woman in a South Carolina prison serving a 12-year sentence after being prosecuted under the state's child abuse law.
"Convicting a woman for homicide based on pregnancy loss is wholly without precedent in Anglo-American law," the woman's attorneys argued in their unsuccessful appeal.
Pregnant women and their advocates have been engaged for years in a running controversy with South Carolina prosecutors determined to punish women for drug use while they are pregnant. Three times the dispute has gone to the Supreme Court; the women have prevailed once, the prosecutors twice.
The justices have never ruled on the constitutionality of using the criminal laws to control the decisions that pregnant women make about their health and that of the fetus they are carrying. South Carolina has gone the furthest with prosecution in those circumstances, on the theory that an unborn fetus is a child entitled to protection against abuse or endangerment by a parent.
After the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed with that theory in 1997, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by a woman convicted of child abuse for using cocaine during pregnancy. The case was based on the discovery of cocaine residue in her baby's blood after the child was born.
The justices, however, did step in two years ago, striking down a state policy requiring hospitals to turn over positive drug test results from pregnant women for use in prosecuting those women for child abuse. Until the latest prosecution of a Conway, S.C., woman, Regina D. McKnight, the state had never used its homicide law to prosecute a woman for her conduct during pregnancy.
In 1999, when McKnight was 22, a hospital delivered a stillborn daughter, weighing five pounds. McKnight had no prior problems with the pregnancy, and intended to carry the fetus to live birth. She had picked out the name Mercedes for the child. Within minutes after the baby was born dead, hospital staff found cocaine in McKnight's urine sample. Later, an autopsy showed cocaine residue in the dead infant's blood.
McKnight was prosecuted for homicide of a child, carrying up to life in prison as punishment. She was convicted after the jury was told that intent to harm her baby could be based upon a finding of recklessness or severe negligence. She was given a 20-year sentence, reduced by the judge to 12 years.
In McKnight's appeal to the state Supreme Court, her lawyers argued that she had no notice that her use of cocaine could lead to a murder charge. But the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction, saying it was "public knowledge" that cocaine harms the health of a fetus.
A group of health and medical advocacy groups, supporting her appeal, told the court that as many as 20 to 30 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth. In about 10 percent of stillbirths, the groups argued, "something simply goes awry," and the pregnancy is lost.
"The scientific community that specializes in research on the effects of cocaine," those groups' legal brief said, "is currently unable to reach consensus about the nature of the harms posed by pre-natal cocaine exposure." It is "a myth," the brief added, "that mere exposure to cocaine causes certain fetal harms."
The state urged the Supreme Court to bypass the case.
"This is not simply a case involving a tragic stillbirth that occurred through no fault of the mother," its brief said. "The evidence established a direct link between McKnight's ingestion of crack cocaine, which she had no legally protected right to do, and her child's in utero death."
The state's lawyers argued that pregnant women like McKnight were well aware of state court rulings in South Carolina that applied child abuse and homicide laws to unborn fetuses.
The court turned aside McKnight's appeal among hundreds of orders it issued on the first day of its new term.
In one of the other orders, the justices overturned a $79.5 million award of punitive damages to the estate of an Oregon janitor and longtime smoker who died in 1997 of lung cancer. The order requires Oregon state courts to reconsider that verdict under a ruling by the justices earlier this year narrowing the power of juries to impose such punitive awards.
The jury had awarded the smoker's family $800,000 for actual damages suffered, but then tacked on the $79.5 million punitive award. The cigarette manufacturer, Philip Morris USA, noted in its appeal that the award was nearly 100 times the compensatory part of the verdict -- a ratio of the kind the Supreme Court criticized in its earlier ruling.
The justices also cleared the way for execution of an Arkansas man, Charles Singleton, who argued that it was unconstitutional for prison officials to give him antipsychotic drugs to make him mentally competent to be executed. Lower courts said the drugs were an appropriate form of medical care for the inmate.
Material from wire services was used in this report.
