Many of us have been following the murder trial of Karen McCarron. She killed her daughter, 3-year-old Katie McCarron, the day before Mother’s Day in 2006. Katie was autistic.
Many of us were scared that there wouldn’t be an impartial jury. There were real fears that the press coverage in the weeks after the murder contaminated the jury pool with its overwhelming sympathy for the accused killer. Not only that, the suggestion was made that the urge to kill one’s child was common for parents of children with autism and other disabilities.
There’s a critique and description of the press coverage on our website titled “Disability Advocates Call for Restraint and Responsibility in Murder Coverage“.
Luckily, those fears weren’t realized. Here is the news from the trial, issued some 20 minutes ago as I write this:
Karen McCarron guilty
Jury finds woman who killed autistic daughter guilty on all charges
Posted: Thursday, January 17, 2008 at 2:13 p.m.PEKIN (AP) — Jurors deliberated for nine hours over two days before finding a central Illinois mother guilty of suffocating her autistic daughter.
Thirty-nine-year-old Karen McCarron was taken into custody after Thursday’s
ruling.Authorities say McCarron killed her 3-year-old daughter with a garbage bag in May 2006. The family lived in Morton.
The charges against her were first-degree murder, obstruction of justice and concealment of a homicide. –Stephen Drake
Addendum: I hope this isn’t a bad omen, but I just got off the phone with the Chicago AP office, which is transmitting its coverage of the trial over the wires. The latest story from them has a very big problem in it. Here’s the most troublesome quote, this one taken from the AP story on the Chicago Tribune website:
In a videotaped confession played during the trial, McCarron told police she could no longer deal with her daughter’s illness. People with autism often struggle to control impulses, and children with autism can be difficult to manage.
What’s implied here is that Katie McCarron was “difficult to manage.” As I pointed out to the AP staffer, testimony from Katie’s father, grandfather and other relatives last week said that she was an easy child to “manage.” Not only that, Karen McCarron hadn’t been raising Katie at all for about 20 months. She was with her only a few days before killing her.
The staffer at the AP conceded these points. All of them.
Let’s hope tomorrow’s story from the AP is free of “blame the victim” references.
Thanks for calling the AP to task on that totally unnecessary section of their article.
sharon,
it was the very least I could do.
It looks like it got slowly edited out of later versions of the story. –Stephen