Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care

Download or read book Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care written by Wendy A. Bach and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First the structure of this particular law: Technically speaking, the legislature created this crime, not by creating an entirely new crime but by enacting a law clarifying an existing criminal statute. This is how it worked: Like every other state, Tennessee makes assault a crime. It is an misdemeanor, which means that if you violate the statute, you can be incarcerated for no more than eleven months and twenty-nine days. Assault is defined, in Tennessee, as "[i]ntentionally, knowingly or recklessly caus[ing] bodily injury to another . . . ." You will notice, when you read this, that this particular language says nothing about pregnancy or a fetus. For prosecutors who might want a to charge a woman with assault because of her drug use during pregnancy, the absence of specific language about pregnancy or the fetus in the statute could cause legal problems. She could argue, in that case, that taking drugs while pregnant is not what the legislators meant by assault. Despite this possible legal problem, across the nation, and in Tennessee, women have been prosecuted for drug use during pregnancy for violating statutes all of which were not initially designed to criminalize this particular conduct. For example, women have been charged with assault, chemical endangerment of a minor, or child abuse, and the prosecutors in those cases have argued that in-utero drug exposure was included in the definitions of those crimes. But in many states, these charges led to legal disputes. The disputes in these cases often came down to the question of whether or not in-utero drug exposure was the kind of conduct that the legislature intended to make criminal when they wrote the law"--