The scenario is pure tragedy. Via UNC lawprof Tamar Birckhead, who spent a decade in the trenches as a public defender, the story of Cassidy Goodson offers nothing to warm one’s heart.
Tamar’s post raises questions about our inability to prevent this tragedy from occurring. Sure, “safe havens” have been created for mothers who shouldn’t be, providing them with a better way of ridding themselves of a child than murder, but their efficacy for a 9th grader is dubious. Tragedy ensues, one way or another.According to a news release from the local sheriff’s office, on Sept. 19, 2012, Cassidy Goodson went into labor in the bathroom of her family’s mobile home in Lakeland, Florida. To hide her cries of pain, she placed a towel in her mouth and ran the water in the faucet. She used a pair of scissors to pry the nine and a half pound baby out of her womb and into the toilet, where she squeezed its neck until it stopped moving. Then she cleaned up the bathroom, showered with the dead baby, and placed the infant’s body in a shoebox along with her soiled clothes and towels.
Three days later, after smelling a strong odor coming from Cassidy’s room, her mother found the deceased newborn and placed a frantic call to the police. Upon questioning by homicide detectives, Cassidy confessed to choking the baby to stop him from breathing because she “didn’t know what to do with it.” Autopsy results have confirmed that the cause of death was asphyxia from strangulation and blunt force trauma. The ninth-grader is now being held at the county juvenile detention facility and ultimately could be sentenced to life in prison.
Tamar searches for answers, which have been elusive for centuries. We don’t want this to happen. When it does, is anything solved by throwing away the child mother?Of course, we’ve been down this road before. A teenage girl hides her pregnancy, gives birth in secret, and puts the infant in a trash bag or dumpster. The baby is discovered – sometimes alive, but more often than not, dead. The public responds with anger and disgust. The girl reports paralyzing fear and intense shame – for having sex, getting pregnant, not knowing what to do, and abandoning or smothering her own baby. The criminal justice system steps in, extracts a conviction, and imposes punishment – typically including a prison sentence.
Despite the questions, and considerations, raised in Tamar’s post, it was picked up by the Huffington Post, and linked under it’s Crime banner, where such stories are salaciously fed to the masses with the least amount of thought possible. The interest isn’t edification, but page views, and anything that works up the masses into a lather makes for good content.
The by-product of having been mentioned can be seen in the comments to Tamar’s post.
So much for even the most minimal effort at thought. Fourteen-year-old Cassidy Goodson is “EVIL.” No need to deal with the problem, the tragedy of a baby murdered and a 9th grader who will be tried as an adult for it. After all, since she’s “EVIL,” and our beloved children are wonderful, there is no problem to fix. Evil people do evil things, and this has nothing to do with us, our children, our world. Just rid society of these “EVIL” people and problem solved.
What readers here, and people who are otherwise slightly attuned to the horrible reality that bad things happen at the hand of human beings, often fail to appreciate is that there are others in our society, a great many others, who have a solution to these tragedies when people like Tamar (and me) don’t. Just get rid of them. Easy, right?
Did Cassidy Goodson wake up one morning with the purpose of someday choking a baby to death? Was she otherwise a relatively ordinary young teen, with dreams of going to a prom, or being a volleyball player, or maybe attending college where she could learn to become a nurse?
Did she make a mistake in having sex and getting pregnant at such a tender age? You bet. It’s a mistake made all too often, despite the plethora of efforts by the government, churches and parents to stop teen pregnancy. Something about hormones and human nature seems to keep getting in the way of solving the problem.
But at the instant of giving birth, which she somehow concealed from her family and somehow felt was better concealed than seeking her mother’s help, with different raging hormones flowing through her body, she made the most horrific choice possible.
Let’s be clear, what she did to her newborn baby was as horrible as could be. The act of infanticide is evil. But that doesn’t make Cassidy Goodson evil.
To plumb the depths of what went wrong here would require far more words, and far greater understanding, than I possess. To chalk it up to a facile attack of a child by calling her “EVIL” suggests that society has just given up on trying to solve our problems and resorted to the lowest, most ignorant, response.
While people like Tamar try to infuse terrible scenarios with some thought in the hope that we can do better to avoid both the horror of infanticide itself, and the horror of dumping the life of a 14-year-old into a hole until she dies, others like Huffington Post Crime cater to ignorance as long as it brings in advertising revenue. Like it or not, their reach dwarfs the reach of blawgs like Tamar’s. Or mine. Or any of the others who do their best not to make people stupider.
As the comments to Tamar’s post shows, this is going to be a very hard battle to fight. For most people, thinking makes their head hurt.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I wonder if the mom had any alternative but to call the police?
Sounds like Cassidy did what too many people do; found herself in a tough spot and, instead of stepping up and handling it the right way, she murdered someone. That’s what the justice system is for.
Trying her as an adult seems excessive, though.
I hate the use of words like evil and monster applied to (accused) criminals. This case seems especially aggregious. The girl was very young, obviously without anyone to talk to, and acted in a way that I submit shows instant and severe remorse… She showered with, and kept, the baby. You’re right to call this a tragedy. Would she have wanted to keep the child if (in her mind anyway) there was any way she could? It seems not impossible.
People are animals, no matter how fancy or blessed by Our Lord On High. And when we’re trapped, we behave in ways that are often inappropriate. The culture loves to pretend that all actions are reasonable and considered decisions. But the ones that involve salacious stories generally aren’t (outside of the kardashians; different breed of animal).
My personal belief is that every action has a history based in the experiences of that person; understanding those reasons can be a cause for compassion. But that a person, at a certain point in their life, is responsible for those actions, no matter what the history. So compassion, yes. Excuse, no. At a certain point. Is a 6 year old a criminal for shooting his father when his father is beating his mother to death? No.
Admittedly I was a bit vague about “a certain point”. I think 14, under these circumstances, is below that point. Not that some state intervention isn’t needed. But adult murder charges? Fuck that. This is one of those cases I don’t envy lawyers their jobs. I do have to say the SCOTUS decisions about juveniles and sentencing are welcome. As far as bright line rules go.
I wonder how many of those commentators considered the possibility that the girl could have known, for a fact, and correctly, that her life and/or the life of her baby would have been forfeit. Such families exist. And they’d hardly be likely to own up to it after an event like this. Of course rank speculation unsupported by any fact other than the actions of a 14 year old.
Part of the cause of these recurring tragedies is surely the breakdown of societal norms and consensus about unwed motherhood. The girl said that she “didn’t know what to do with it,” and in a sense I imagine that is literally true. But there was a time (within my lifetime!) when she (and almost every teenage girl) would have known what she was supposed to do. She would have told her parents; they would have withdrawn her from school and sent her to live with relatives or friends out of town until she gave birth; then she would have put the baby up for adoption and come back home. This was the practice among black and white alike, and, I think, among both rich and poor. Yes, there would have been gossip and embarrassment and a degree of shame, but the girl would have gone on with her life, and the stigma, like so many problems of high school life, would have been behind her in a few years. Her life would not have been ruined, and her baby would not have died.
This is not to say that the days of 50 years ago are a lost paradise. But something real was definitely lost when the consensus about proper conduct dissolved and every girl (and her parents, for that matter) must face the situation as if it had never happened before, and must improvise her own solution, lacking maturity, experience and guidance.
I think that it’s pretty unsurprising that in a state whose major attitude towards sexual education for teenagers can be summed up as “Just say no.” that you get tragedies like this. It is amazing that the same people who have such a deep and abiding hatred of abortion seem to have such an abhorrence for teaching skills to teenagers that might reduce the need for same.
In this case, I wonder what difference a few hours with a really competent sexual educator would have done for this girl, if she’d had it a year or so ago?
What she actually did to that infant is awful, of course, but I remember how bad my own coping skills were at thirteen, and I can’t bring myself to judge her for it.
Your point is well taken. Not that we want to bring back homes for unwed mothers, but deeply-rooted norms guided young people, for better or worse. In their absence, there’s a lot of spinning in circles and confusion, with young people left to reinvent the wheel when they aren’t at all capable.
Even in more “enlightened” states, I’m not sure that 14 years olds would have the maturity to know how to deal with this situation if they were unable to talk to their parents. Some would, no doubt, but many wouldn’t have a clue. It takes a lot more maturity to address pregnancy than get pregnant.
You know what? I’ll go out on a limb and disagree with you: committing infanticide means you’re evil. I guess that makes me ignorant.
For someone who’s ignorant, that’s a damn fine guess.
I wonder what She was thinking during her pregnancy? Was she thinking about what she was going to do..was she waiting to tell her parents and she ran out of time…Did she plan on killing her baby? What were her thoughts when the baby was moving around in the womb? Did she talk to her baby at night? How long was she going to keep the body for? I guess she probably just made herself believe she wasnt pregnant, and erased it from her mind completly…
Given how unthinkable this is in its entirety, I can’t even begin to imagine. If I had to guess, she was in complete denial about the baby, but there is nothing about what happened here that can make any sense to a rational person.