Moira Akers was prosecuted and convicted of the murder of a newborn in 2022. She claims to have given birth to a stillborn baby in her home in Columbia, Maryland, in 2018.
Prosecutors doubted Akers’ story, using her online searches for abortion services and lack of prenatal care as evidence of ill intent. But it was a “forensic method” devised in the 17th century that proved key to Akers’ conviction.
The method, known as a “float test,” was designed to determine if a baby was stillborn or born alive by placing the lungs of a deceased fetus in water. If the lungs float, then they are aerated, meaning the baby was breathing and alive prior to their death.
In 2018, former Maryland chief medical examiner Dr. David Fowler signed the autopsy report that, using the float test as proof, determined that Akers’ baby died after Akers asphyxiated it. Fowler also testified in Akers’ trial. Prosecutors used Fowler’s testimony and autopsy report as evidence to convict Akers of second-degree murder in 2022.
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- 2 days
Fuck sake. Next they’ll take the accused to the corpse to see if it ‘spits blood’ in the presence of the murderer. Old as the practice was, what happened in this Maryland case sounds almost as uninformed and ludicrous.
4 days“The hospital physicians attending told the police who had arrived at the scene not to speak to her for at least two hours after surgery because she was put under general anesthesia,” Akers’ lawyer, Debra Saltz, told us in an interview.
“So the police, rather than wait two hours, interviewed her. I think it was approximately an hour and 20 minutes later, they began an interview.”
Saltz challenged the admissibility of the interview in court. But presiding Judge McCrone ruled that Akers “sounded okay” after reviewing a recording of the interview. [emphasis mine]
Who needs practicing anaesthesiologists who’ve spent years at the bleeding edge of science learning how sedative drugs affect human consciousness when you have Timothy J. McCrone, (now former) judge for the Howard County Circuit Court, who can eyeball a video and say “ah, fuck it”?
- 2 days
Like wtf SIDS is an extremely well known occurence, so what if the baby had air in its lungs? Not to mention any of the methodological issues with this…
Wouldn’t a fucking autopsy be the right call here?
SIDs isn’t a real diagnosis beyond “we can’t prove what killed this baby and people generally aren’t big fans of infant autopsies to find out it was a unknown heart defect or whatever”
It’s also only applied to babies older than a month, the implication being not to apply it to stillborns or infants that simply never had a chance. That’s just not what the label is for.
- 2 days
The same ‘experts’ who, after consulting with an ai, outweigh any and all eminent professionals in any given field.
- 3 days
I’d argue that at minimum, anything said within 24 hours of coming out of anesthesia should be disregarded and inadmissible to court.
- 3 days
You’re not even allowed to sign a contract in the first eight hours after general anesthesia.
- 3 days
Holy shit did these people literally use Monty Python logic to convict a woman of murder???
more like the witch trials, if the witch can breath under water and surfaces, they are a witch if not they sent an"innocent" to thier death.
I think the fact that she had no pre-natal care and was searching for medical information online instead of asking a doctor suggests, to me at least, that she was very much in the lower strata of economic class.
A wealthier person could have spoken to a doctor about abortions and had the protection of doctor patient confidentiality, rather that having her search for medical information used against her.
