Mea Shearim – Outrage at Plea Deal for Mother Accused of Starving Son

Mea Shearim, Israel – The woman accused of starving her son accepted a plea bargain on Thursday after evidence was presented at Jerusalem’s Magistrate’s Court, including testimony from the doctor who cared for the child.

Dr. Michael Weintraub described the terrible state to which the child had deteriorated, and it seems this may have prompted the renewed efforts to agree to a plea bargain she had previously rejected on advice from her rabbis.

According to the agreement, the mother will be under house arrest for three years, and kept away from the children for five years except under conditions to be determined for visiting. She is also expected to undergo medical treatment. After two years, if she meets the conditions of the plea bargain, she will be able to see her children in their house under observation for a few hours each day.

The senior doctor from Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital in Jerusalem gave testimony for about an hour regarding the signs he had discovered in the boy H., who was three years old at the time, and the behavior of his mother, which he described as “violent acts.”

When he was first brought to hospital, the child had undergone extensive checks to ascertain what was causing him so much suffering, when in fact doctors were seeking a disease that didn’t exist.

Each time medical teams tried to feed H., Weintraub said, his mother would say that something was hurting him and that he shouldn’t be fed. At this stage they still believed her, because nobody wanted to think that a mother would harm her child.

The doctor even demonstrated, using a doll, how the mother would disconnect the feeding tubes from the child, though only the medical team was authorized to do this. The boys’ uncle, the doctor said, related that he had seen the mother’s hands under the blanket and the boy screaming in pain. At this point it was decided to take the boy under medical supervision.

“We were concerned that the mother would decide to take him to another hospital, so we reported the incident,” the doctor testified. “She strongly opposed and was furious that we moved the boy to a room closer to the nurses’ station.”

Weintraub emphasized that on the day the mother was kept away from the ward, the boy’s skin condition disappeared, and his skin cleared up completely.

“When the mother wasn’t around, the boy slept soundly and no morphine was required,” he said. “When we kept her away from him, in less than a week we were able to stop the morphine completely, and the child got completely well and didn’t need any drugs.”

Later, upon receiving further evidence, the possibility that he was suffering from his mother’s acts was raised. It was also suspected that the mother suffered from Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, in which a parent causes marks of illness on the child.

The mother’s legal defense tried to persuade her to accept the plea bargain, according to which she would admit to most of the paragraphs in the indictment and would thus avoid jail.

On Thursday morning, she was still refusing the agreement in accordance with instructions from her rabbis, but after the doctor’s testimony the two sides requested a break in the proceedings because they were close to reaching a plea bargain.

It should be noted that the conditions for her detention and what access she should have to her children during the trial have already been extensively discussed. At the same time, the haredi population has held ongoing and sometimes violent protests against her arrest.

District Court Judge Moshe Ravid eventually ruled that the mother should be kept away from Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, together with her children – excluding H., who was the victim of her abuse – and that she would be held under house arrest with 24-hour surveillance.

All appeals by the prosecution against this ruling were rejected. The replacement of the mother’s defense team also resulted in delays to the trial.

**UPDATE**
Outrage at Deal

Children’s rights activists and organizations expressed outrage on Thursday over a plea bargain struck between state prosecutors and a mother from Jerusalem charged with knowingly starving her young son.

According to the deal, the mother will confess to child abuse offenses and evade a prison sentence. She will be barred from having custody of her children for five years, during which time she will be able to meet with her children during supervised visits.

The plea bargain must receive approval from a Jerusalem court on Monday before going into effect.

“This is an outrageous plea bargain which has resulted in an outcome that is lenient in the extreme for the suspect,” Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, Director of the National Council for the Child, said in a statement on Thursday. “It seems that the blood of children in Israel is horrifyingly cheap,” he said, warning that the bargain sent a dangerous message for potential future child abusers.

“State prosecutors would not dare make such a shameful plea bargain in other offenses, even offenses considered lighter than child abuse,” Kadman added.

Kadman lamented the common use of plea bargains in settling child abuse cases, noting that 80 percent of such charges result in plea bargains, and called on courts to reject them.

Responding to the fierce criticisms, Jerusalem State Prosecutor Tal Weisman said that the arrangement was guided mainly by a “a concern for the welfare of the mother’s children.”

“The suspect has six children and suffers from a serious disturbance,” Weisman said, adding that the plea bargain would ensure that the mother’s contact with her children would be supervised and monitored by Social Services for years to come.

As the debate raged on Thursday, Haredi Rabbi Avraham Froilich, who has maintained along with members of the haredi community in Jerusalem that the mother is innocent of all charges, called on her not to sign the plea bargain.