The Schizophrenic and the California Brood Mare
The flourishing free market of sperm, eggs, surrogates, uterine transplants, and embryos has outpaced functional regulation or ethical consideration. Consumers, donors, and clinics are exploiting an under-regulated marketplace to get what they want (namely, babies and money), and the results are gruesome.
Here’s one bizarre case: Melissa Cook is a forty-seven-year-old surrogate in California with four children of her own. She gave birth to triplets in February of this year (all boys, seven weeks premature), having entered into surrogacy with an out-of-state man who wanted a baby. The two had never met but with Cook, the man—a deaf postal worker who lives with his elderly parents, and is named in court documents only as C.M.—signed a 75-page contract created by C.M.’s lawyer. The sperm would come from him and the eggs from an anonymous donor. For her service as a surrogate, they had agreed, Cook was to be paid $27,000, with an additional $6,000 for multiples. C.M. would cover all of the medical expenses.
Cook underwent in-vitro fertilization, an extremely costly procedure. Due to the price-tag and the possibility that an embryo may not take, doctors often use two or three embryos hoping that at least one develops into a fetus. (This despite cases like that of Nadya Suleman, an unemployed mother of six who had twelve new embryos implanted in her by a physician. Seven took, with one splitting into twins. Since giving birth in 2009, Suleman’s become best known by her tabloid moniker: Octomom.)
READ MOREChristmas Card from a Drunk (and Twelve Hookers) in Van Nuys
The Los Angeles Police Department officers who handcuffed me and put me under arrest on the side of Interstate Highway 10 were very polite. They informed me of my rights and allowed me to sit in the front seat of their black and white—still cuffed—on the way to the Van Nuys jailhouse in the San Fernando Valley.
For years now, I had engaged in the same strange calculus as so many of my fellow citizens had done, by virtue of our city’s rambling geography, peculiar infrastructure, and our shared assholery: I was driving drunk.
This was likely my tenth or fifteenth time doing so and, like any native, I knew the typical tricks: avoid the highways, take the side streets, stay out of certain canyons after 10 p.m., and, most importantly: do not speed. I broke all these rules. Despondent and agitated over some latest bout of male rejection, I had an extra glass of wine at a bar with friends before angrily setting off toward the coast. I manically checked my phone along the way for the response to an unrequited text message. I hoped that in the twenty-minute drive to the seaside I would cool down and that, somewhere between Santa Monica’s neon Ferris wheel and the cliffs of Malibu, I’d recover my composure and a sliver of dignity.
READ MOREHow to Shoot a Suspect in the Back, Reasonably
Beyond the racial prejudice of juries and district attorneys, a major—and frequently ignored—factor as to why county prosecutors fail to indict cops who maim or kill unarmed citizens is a handful of Supreme Court and federal cases that exalt police discretion over common sense.
The key question at the center of these excessive force cases is “reasonableness”—not what is reasonable to you and me, but to a police officer. Writing on behalf of the court in Graham v. Connor, a landmark case regarding police violence, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” The court went even further by couching the officer’s reasonableness in the likely context of “split-second judgments” and “in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.” The preemptive apologism of this language provides police with a wide breadth for mistakes or misconduct—and the public with little guarantee of even application. It fortifies the absurd idea that the hastiest of police actions is not only justifiable, it is eminently reasonable.
Dethorne Graham, a North Carolinian transportation worker and diabetic, brought the case to the Supreme Court. One afternoon in 1984, Graham was feeling the onset of a bad insulin reaction from low blood sugar. Graham called a friend, William Berry, for a ride to the convenience store to get some orange juice. Graham went into the store while Berry waited in the car. There was a long line at the check-out counter so Graham quickly decided to look elsewhere. Rushing out, Graham got back in Berry’s car. What police officer Connor, parked across the street, saw was Graham hurry into the store, run out, and then jump into his friend’s car; moves considered “textbook” for a thief.
READ MOREFear and Insanity in Michigan
Jason Brian Dalton, the alleged mass shooter who left six people dead in random street attacks this February, told police that he believed his Uber app was controlling his mind and body. According to Det. William Moorian’s report for the Department of Public Safety, Dalton, who worked as an Uber driver, claimed the company’s new logo appeared as “the Eastern star and a devil head popped up on his screen and when he pressed the button on the app, that is when all the problems started.”
Dalton claimed that the devil figure in the Uber app gave him assignments, providing him with general navigation, and then took over his whole body to the point where he didn’t need drive the car at all because the Prince of Darkness (under the cloak of Uber) was in control.
According to Det. Moorian’s report, he told police that while he was possessed by the Mephistophelean app, he could “drive over 100mph and go through stop signs,” noted that the devil looked like “horned cow or something like that,” and saw himself outside of his own body. Dalton’s mental competency hearing will take place this spring, and determine if he is capable of participating in his own defense.
READ MOREReally, Really Bad: Michael Jackson’s Bibliophilia
The British cable channel Sky Arts caused a fracas last month when they announced that Joseph Fiennes would be playing the late Michael Jackson in a one-off comedy about a road trip Jackson reportedly took with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor to escape New York City after the terror attacks of 9/11.
According to a 2011 Vanity Fair article about the last decade of Taylor’s life, she and Brando were in New York to attend two nights of Jackson concerts at Madison Square Garden. After the towers were hit, the trio of icons was trapped in the city unable to charter flights out of Manhattan. Ever the diva, Jackson maintained that they would be targeted next. Elizabeth Taylor, a staunch defender of Jackson in all things (including during both rounds of child molestation accusations against him, in 1993 and 2003, which ended with Jackson being cleared of wrongdoing), must have agreed. The group rented a car and made it as far as Ohio, stopping several times along the way to go to KFCs and Burger Kings at Brando’s insistence.
In spending more time than I’d like to admit Googling photos of Michael Jackson to find any that bore a resemblance to Fiennes (in truth, Courteney Cox would have been a better choice), I came across a court document from Jackson’s 2005 child molestation trial. While less sensational than the claims made by his alleged victims, it certainly gives a different edge to those public and chaste sleepovers Jackson would conduct with pre-pubescent boys.
READ MOREThis Is Not a Simulation
Here’s what Gregory Merritt, a supervisor at the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services knew.
He knew that eight-year old Gabriel Fernandez had a BB gun bullet lodged in his chest but that he never received medical care. He knew that the first grader had written a suicide note but his family did not access mental health services that were available to young Gabriel. He knew that Gabriel’s mother, Pearl Sinthia Fernandez, had been investigated DCFS six times for alleged abuse against her son.
Merritt also knew that his subordinate, Patricia Clement, the social worker charged with looking after Gabriel’s well being, had a tendency to avoid doing her job. According to testimony and Merritt’s performance review of Clement, the social worker had a habit of closing child abuse inquiries prematurely, not properly documenting her investigations, and growing easily frustrated with difficult clients.
READ MORETwilight of the Superpredators
In the early 1990s a conservative criminologist at Princeton, John J. DiIulio, scanned the horizon and predicted that a new superbreed of hoodlums was coming like a demographic tidal wave. Over a twenty-year span, DiIulio forecast, 270,000 juvenile offenders would roam the nation’s streets, looking to rob, rape, or assault law-abiding citizens. Due to the depravation of the drugs ingested by their mothers, these young men would be too neurologically damaged to feel empathy; growing up, they would be “fatherless, Godless, and jobless.” According to DiIulio, these youths would prove to be superpredatory, “more terrorist than criminal.”
In his 1996 essay, “My Black Crime Problem and Ours,” DiIulio later wrote, “Think how many black children grow up where parents neglect and abuse them, where other adults and teenagers harass and harm them, where drug dealers exploit them. Not surprisingly, in return for the favor, some of these children kill, rape, maim, and steal without remorse.” DiIulio’s prophecy was echoed by other respected criminologists like James Q. Wilson, Alfred Blumstein, and James Fox, who christened the future “a bloodbath.”
The public at large already had an image for packs of feral black teens destined to terrorize civilians: the Central Park Five, a group of mostly black boys from gritty uptown projects who took to the park to swagger, bully, and punk well-to-do locals. When they were (wrongfully) accused of brutally raping and assaulting a female jogger, the images of glowering young black boys saturated nightly news coverage.
READ MORETexas Foster Care Is an Unconstitutional Snake Pit
On January 8, the state of Texas filed to appeal U. S. District Judge Janis Jack’s December 2015 ruling that the Texas foster care system is a place where “rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm.” Jack’s blistering 260-page report makes for brutal reading. Filled with tragic and infuriating instances of both parental and state negligence, it concludes that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) consistently violated the children’s Fourteenth Amendment right to be “reasonably safe from harm while in government custody and the right to receive the most appropriate care, treatment, and services.”
Justice Jack cited the state’s failure to hire enough case workers to appropriately meet the needs of their charges, to effectively monitor group homes, to make sure enough qualified staff worked in those homes, to penalize institutions where abuse and rape took place, and to ensure that children were not sent hundreds of miles away from their communities. The totality of these failures, Jack wrote in her decision, “shocks the conscience.”
The national standard for a single caseworker is under fifteen cases, in order to ensure adequate attention be paid to each child. Nearly half of Texas’s caseworkers have over twenty-one cases. While several commissioned reports pointed out this problem to DFPS as long ago as 1990, nothing has been done to remedy the crisis, Jack ruled. What’s more, between 2009 and 2013, case loads increased. The ruling cites several expert witnesses, testimonies, and reports that stress how detrimental high case loads are to child safety. When caseworkers are overburdened, children fall through the cracks.
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