Family Abuse Prosecution

Abstract

On a windy and cold November evening last year, Latasha Moore brought her twenty-month-old son, Robert, into a large inner-city hospital emergency room. The child suffered severe burns on his buttocks, the backs of both legs, and his hands and feet. When the medical personnel examined Robert, they found that the top layers of his skin were completely gone, as if they had been ripped off, and the bloody tissue below was now exposed. The examining physician, used to seeing cases of child abuse, recognized Robert’s injury as a submersion burn, which occurs when a young child, and occasionally an elderly person, is intentionally submerged in scalding water. Submersion burns, the doctor knew, differ from accidental burns in that with submersion burns there are no splash burns on other parts of the body, such as on the face or chest, which would occur if a child accidentally fell or climbed into the water. The hospital personnel telephoned the police, and an on-call child abuse detective came to the emergency room.