I was talking to a friend in Romania the other day and he said it feels like he is always seeing Longmont in the news.
It’s true. Longmont has made national (and apparently international) headlines a lot in the past few years, and not for good reasons: catastrophic floods, carjackings involving kids, and most recently a fetal abduction in which a woman who was 7 months pregnant responded to a Craigslist ad for free baby clothes was beaten, stabbed and had her baby cut from her womb and kidnapped.
For what it’s worth – crime rates in Longmont have actually decreased in the last year, as opposed to Boulder, which has higher crime rates which haven’t decreased, but this kind of stuff, although not characteristic of this fine town, gets a lot of publicity – as it should.
The suspect’s arraignment will be today at 1:30, but the Times-Call reported that the DA has already stated that murder will not be among the charges brought against this woman, the reason being that Colorado law does not count the death of an unborn child as murder, unless the child lived outside of the womb for some time. The issue in this case is that it’s not possible to prove that the child lived outside of the womb, and if so, for how long – so Colorado’s wording of the law will not allow a murder charge in this case.
People in Longmont were protesting this and picketing on Main Street last week when it was first announced. The charges expected to be brought against the suspect are: suspicion of attempted first-degree murder, first-degree assault and child abuse knowingly and recklessly resulting in death.
The problem with those charges are that even all together they will not lead to as strong of a sentence as if murder or manslaughter had been part of it. Since the mother survived, and there is no proof that the baby lived outside of the womb, Colorado law has no way to charge her with anything stronger.
What do you think? Is this justice?
The sad part of this is that if this attack had not happened, this baby would have lived. The baby’s life was clearly taken by this attack. I find it hard to accept that we have no way to prosecute that.
Theology for the People 
Yes, the law stinks and it shows me clearly those who hurt others can sometimes get away with it. It is very a sad situation for me.
I expect they’ll do their best to throw the book at her with what the law provides them. How sad it is though when you have to create new laws for crimes you would never have imagined someone committing.
Had Colorado valued unborn humans’ lives already in their laws there would at least be a manslaughter charge – which I think there clearly should be.
They would have to make a law in regards to your baby being taken out by forces beyond your control, so to protect the women who commit murder each year with abortions.
One of the charges brought against the woman was “unlawful termination of a pregnancy in the first degree”.
over 3300 babies are aborted every day in America – and of those 77% of the mothers give reasons that can reasonably be interpreted as “the baby is an inconvenience” – that is a powerful lobby against laws that define an unborn child as a person.