Should This Man Go Free?

Today’s New York Times Sunday magazine contains a fascinating article about Greg Ousley, a 33-year-old Indiana man who is in prison for killing his parents when he was 14 years old.  Journalist Scott Anderson reports that Greg is serving a 60-year sentence, with no possibility of parole until 2019. However, Greg’s appeals lawyer is pursuing a sentence modification procedure, which could potentially allow him to be released early if none of the victims’ next of kin object. Of the seven relatives in question – his two sisters and five aunts and uncles – only one aunt objects to the early parole. This is enough to derail the process for now, despite the fact that prison officials think Greg has been rehabilitated since he has been a model prisoner for years and has earned both a high school equivalency certificate and a college degree (magna cum laude) while in prison.

As Anderson points out in his article, parricide is a fairly rare crime, and the killing of both parents is rarer still. Most of the cases seem to involve severe physical or sexual abuse of the child-turned-killer. Greg Ousley’s case is more nuanced. He appears not to have been severely abused, although his parents clearly had issues and few would nominate them for parents of the year – at least if Greg’s version is to be believed. Greg’s dad had a fairly serious drinking problem, his mother (who had been orphaned at a young age) had abandonment issues and was prone to rages in which she verbally abused her children. Apparently neither parent was good at verbally expressing either love or empathy. Greg was angry at his parents for the way they treated him, and he was especially angry at his mother after he found her in the garage kissing his father’s best friend. Greg was also severely depressed. Both a middle school teacher and Greg’s mother seem to have recognized this, but their somewhat modest efforts to address the issue with Greg were rebuffed, and they did not pursue the conversation further. At some point Greg decided to kill his parents, he wrote about it in his journal, he told his friends that he would kill his parents, and ultimately he shot both his father and mother at point-blank range with a 12-gauge shotgun. Ironically, he did it on a night that he now remembers as a night when his parents reached out to him in a positive way, and the three had spent the evening playing guitar and singing at home.

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Judging Mothers

A mother’s choice about whether to breast feed or bottle feed her infant may seem like a purely personal decision. In fact, for decades it has been an individual decision with wide-reaching social, economic and political ramifications. Issues have ranged from the economic interests of large baby formula manufacturers to the introduction of formula in developing countries where there are problems with its safe use to medical advice suggesting that breast milk is superior for babies and social disapproval of women who either don’t nurse their babies or who stop nursing before the recommended one-year mark.

In an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, author Alissa Quart discusses the fact that less than 50% of American babies are breast-fed for at least six months, despite a medical culture that sometimes portrays formula as “evil” and a competitive mothering society where women ask each other “How long did you go?” Quart opines that this is understandable, given the time-consuming nature of breast-feeding, and the demands of many women’s workplaces which offer little or no maternity leave, little on-site daycare, and not enough flexibility to allow women to either structure their hours to allow nursing, or to pump milk while at work for later use by a caregiver. She argues that this breast-feeding obsession is part of a social phenomenon that seeks to eliminate all risks to children, and that we need to allow women to make individual decisions without subjecting them to guilt trips.

In The Conflict: How Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (newly released in an English edition), French sociologist Elisabeth Badinter argues that the aggressive push for breast-feeding engineered by doctors, governments, and private groups such as the international La Leche League, is a significant part of a larger social agenda to demand perfection in parenting and especially in mothering. This has huge social and economic ramifications, according to Badinter, because seeking mothering perfection along these lines precludes women from equal competition in many professions, and leaves them at a permanent economic disadvantage in the workplace.

So what relevance do these discussions have for a legal blog?

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Can Women Lawyers Have It All?

The July/August issue of The Atlantic features the article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a lawyer, Princeton professor and former director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department. Already the article has provoked a firestorm of controversy in print and online, as women and men weigh in on Slaughter’s bottom line: having it all in a rarified top tier job is not currently possible, but could be if we make some much needed changes to society and workplaces.

Slaughter begins the article by describing her own conflict between her dream foreign policy job with the State Department, and her then 14-year-old son who had been acting out at school back in Princeton, New Jersey. Slaughter was working in Washington D.C. during the week, leaving her husband in charge of their two boys; she would return home each weekend to be with the family. Although Slaughter had always assumed she would continue in such a dream job as long as her party was in power, she found that not only did her family need her at home, but she wanted to be there for them. Consequently, as soon as her two-year tenure at the State Department was over, she returned home to Princeton and resumed her work as a tenured professor.

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