Guilty as charged. Murder one. After eight hours of deliberation, a Phoenix jury returned this verdict last week in the murder trial of Scott Falater, 43, an engineer, family man and Mormon priest.
The facts were never in dispute. Falater killed Yarmila, his wife of 20 years, by stabbing her 44 times with his hunting knife before pushing her into the family swimming pool and holding her head underwater. Falater also hid the evidence: He wrapped his blood-drenched clothes and boots in a plastic bag, sealed the bag in a Tupperware container and stashed it in the wheel well of the family Volvo. He changed into pajamas and bandaged his hand, which had been cut in the struggle.
Case closed, right? No question. Why, then, did the jury deliberate for eight hours?
Scott Falater claimed he had no memory of any of the events surrounding his wife’s death, that he was sleepwalking throughout the entire bloody event. When the police arrived to take him to jail, Falater came to realize he was dealing with the homicide division. “Does that mean my wife is dead?” Falater asked, making him either a tragically bereaved husband or a psychopath with a flair for acting and chutzpah to spare.
His attorneys argued that Falater was trying to fix the pump on the family swimming pool, prying loose a stuck O-ring with his hunting knife while asleep. They argued that he stabbed his wife when she startled him and interrupted his repair task. The defense case was bolstered by a bevy of experts in the field of sleep disorders.
Even if Falater was asleep, didn’t he still murder his wife? Not necessarily. Although he admitted killing her, murder requires voluntary actions and the requisite intent. The jury had to decide whether it was possible for a person to stab someone 44 times and hide the evidence, all without waking up.
Doing something in one’s sleep and not remembering the next day is hardly a rarity. Who hasn’t reached over to turn off the alarm clock and not remembered it the next day? I know people sleepwalk because I did it as a kid. Mind you, I did not go after anyone with my Boy Scout knife. I do, however, remember being awakened by my parents as I dragged my bed across the room, dreaming I was tugging on my dog’s leash. I outgrew sleepwalking; now I merely wake up screaming from time to time.
Sleep researchers estimate that 50 percent of children sleepwalk at least once. Ten to 15 percent do so repeatedly, mostly between ages 4 and 12. Sleepwalking episodes peak at around age 10. In adulthood, the prevalence drops to between 2 and 9 percent.
Reading about Scott Falater, I thought about locking up the kitchen knives. But to go from a few nocturnal wanderings or muffled shouts to stabbing one’s spouse more than three dozen times seems a long way — just how long was the question for jurors in a trial that put a spotlight on sleep disorder research.
A backwater of medicine until not too long ago, the study of sleep disorders is now a respected branch of medical research. It involves much more than randomized clinical trials of warm milk vs. counting sheep.
Researchers have identified more than 80 distinct varieties of sleep disorders. Sleepwalking is one variant of what sleep scientists call “parasomnias,” a class of disorders that also includes “night terrors” (my nocturnal banshee screams), bed-wetting, nightmares and sleep-related bruxism, or teeth grinding. Sleep studies reveal that sleepwalkers experience a partial awakening about one to four hours after falling asleep, at the end of the first or second sleep cycle. This happens when they come out of what is known as stage IV NREM sleep. (Rapid eye movement, or REM, is associated with dreaming, in contrast to NREM, “non-rapid eye movement.”) Sleepwalking episodes last from 30 seconds to 30 minutes and occasionally longer.
Advances in sleep research include the development of the polysomnograph, which allows researchers to study the brain waves of sleepers. Researchers have found that during sleepwalking episodes, sleepwalkers exhibit mixtures of brain-wave patterns, including those typically found in deep sleep, in the transition to waking, and in drowsy and waking states. Although the sleepwalker’s body is able to move, the person’s brain is not fully awake. Shakespeare captured this phenomenon in describing the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth:
“You see, her eyes are open.”
“Ay, but their sense is shut.”
What can a sleepwalker, whose brain is not fully in gear, accomplish? Sleepwalkers are clearly capable of quite complex tasks. Peter Fenwick, a sleep researcher at London’s Institute of Psychiatry, has sleepwalking patients who have ridden horses, made breakfast, stripped wallpaper and repaired refrigerators. Sleepwalkers can have conversations, albeit disjointed ones.
A quick perusal of back issues of the medical journal Sleep reveals tales that are by turn puzzling, hilarious and frightening. There are “sleepeaters” who lose their table manners, waking up with hands slathered in spaghetti sauce or smeared with mayonnaise. One sleepwalking woman favored snacks such as buttered cigarettes and cat food sandwiches; an Italian sleepwalker ate his watch.
Sleepers not only can walk, talk and eat — they can have sex, too. An article in the Archives of Sexual Behaviors last year described a man whose lover “became alarmed when she realized one night that while having intercourse in their darkened bedroom that the patient was snoring loudly.” The woman noted that her lover’s unconscious sexual repertoire was highly varied; while sleeping he was “more aggressive and dominant than was his custom while making love in the awake state” and was more prone to “talking dirty.”
Not all sleepwalking episodes are chuckle-worthy. Dr. Clete Kushida, a sleep researcher at Stanford Medical School, estimates a 60 to 70 percent risk of injury during sleepwalking incidents. A Sydney, Australia, hotel is said to have banned sleepwalkers’ conventions because of the damage caused by sleepwalking conventioneers. One 14-year-old boy got out of bed and sleepwalked to the kitchen. He sleepwalked out the kitchen door — of the family’s RV, which was barreling down a San Diego highway at the time.
Sleepwalking — and sleep-talking, sleep-eating and sleep-sex — are clearly real phenomena. But what of violence perpetrated by the sleepwalker, who remembers nothing the next day? Even Scott Falater told Connie Chung, “If I had been at home reading this in the paper … it would have seemed like a pretty bizarre and flaky defense to me, too.” Bizarre and flaky, indeed — but not unprecedented.
The sleepwalking defense has been raised in 20 to 30 murder trials worldwide. In many, the defendants were acquitted, sometimes by reason of insanity. One of the most interesting cases involved a French detective who killed a man while on vacation. Called upon to help solve the crime, he produced definitive evidence that he, himself, had committed the murder while asleep.
When attackers are sleeping, they really seem to go at it. In the early ’80s, another Arizona case involved a man who stabbed his wife 26 times; just last month, the Canadian Supreme Court upheld the seven-year sentence of a man from British Columbia who stabbed his wife 47 times. He hid the body, grabbed some money and a change of clothes and flew to Mexico, where, he claimed, he woke up.
To establish that Scott Falater had been sleepwalking during the brutal slaying, the defense trotted out a string of experts. The leading defense expert was Dr. Roger Broughton, a professor of neurology, director of the sleep disorders center at the University of Ottawa and the winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Sleep Disorders Association. Bald, with a beard and glasses, Broughton could have been provided for the trial by central casting. He had only testified in one previous criminal case, but it was a doozy. In May 1987, Kenneth Parks of suburban Toronto arose from his couch, where he had fallen asleep watching “Saturday Night Live.” He got in his car and drove 14 miles to the home of his in-laws, where he proceeded to pummel his father-in-law into unconsciousness and kill his mother-in-law, beating her with a tire iron and stabbing her five times. Parks was acquitted and Broughton got another line on his CV: “Homicidal Somnambulism: A Case Report.”
Broughton was unflappable on the stand in the Falater case. Although he admitted that some of Falater’s actions gave him “pause,” he concluded after reviewing the complete record that sleepwalking was “by far the most probable” explanation for Scott Falater’s actions the night of Jan. 16, 1997.
The defense experts went to great lengths to portray Falater as someone incapable of waking violence. “He’s kind of nerdy,” testified Falater’s daughter Megan; he’s “a nerd [who] wore that plastic pocket protector,” said Falater’s sister, Laura Healy. Falater’s parents and sisters testified he had sleepwalked as a child. Colleagues testified about stress at work, which could have helped precipitate sleepwalking.
Another defense expert, Rosalind Cartwright, a psychologist with the sleep disorders service at Chicago’s Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, said Yarmila Falater’s slaying was “as pure a case as you can find of sleepwalking violence.”
Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Clinic at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, is one of the nation’s leading experts on sleepwalking violence. He refuses to get involved in criminal trials. For Mahawold, the adversary system forces a binary choice in cases that tend to be shaded in gray. “These cases inevitably end up as pissing matches between the lawyers,” who, Mahawold says, “have no interest at all in finding the truth.”
Why would experts get involved, knowing that they could end up drenched? In fact, the Falater case was marked by a bitter battle of the experts in which expertise, integrity and motivations were impugned. Defense experts were accused of falsifying the results from four nights Falater spent being studied in a sleep lab.
The defense experts testified at no charge, a fact that failed to impress the prosecution. “They’re so quick to want to make this thing a cause cilhbre. They want to be part of this thing … I submit to you that [their risumis] are nothing but steps to their shrines of self-indulgence,” said prosecutor Juan Martinez.
If Rosalind Cartwright thought Falater’s case to be pure, prosecutors were quick to point out contaminating and conflicting pieces of evidence. They underscored sources of potential marital discord, especially differences regarding Scott Falater’s intense involvement with the Mormon church. Beyond trying to establish a motive, the prosecution put the whole field of sleep research on trial.
The jurors betrayed considerable skepticism regarding sleep research as a discipline. In questions permitted during the trial, one juror asked whether the study of sleep disorders relied more on speculation than on science. At a press conference following the announcement of the verdict, jurors keyed in on the actions of Falater they thought too complex and purposeful to be those of a sleepwalker. Why wasn’t he jarred awake by his wife’s screams? How could he have carefully put a bandage on his cut right hand? (He is right-handed.) Why did he need a hunting knife to fix the pool? How could he have sleepwalked for 45 minutes, a period defense experts acknowledged was exceedingly long?
According to Mahawold, medical expertise does not allow for a definitive answer in cases like Falater’s. “Sleep studies can prove someone is a sleepwalker, as is 9 percent of the adult population. But that is only Part 1 of a two-part question. The second question is whether he was sleepwalking on the night of the murder. Only God can answer that.”
God or a jury of Falater’s peers, who didn’t buy the act. Arizona prosecutors now must decide whether to seek the death penalty.
I am a God — at least according to an article in my local
newspaper: “Porn God Takes to the Stage: Jeff Stryker’s ‘Hard Time’ in SF.” I spied the San Francisco Chronicle headline over someone’s
shoulder in the bus on the way to work. I shuddered.
Jeff Stryker. God. Icon. Superstar. Bigger than Life.
Reporters and critics dig deep into their bags of superlatives when
reaching for an adjective to describe the reigning king of gay male
porn, not to mention the legendary member upon which his carefully
nurtured career rests so securely (sometimes referred to as the “eighth
wonder of the world”).
I should be used to it. Let me clarify. I, personally, am not
divine. It is my doppelgdnger, the porn star who took my name, who has
earned the international acclaim and divine status. His star has
ascended steadily in the pornography firmament over his 13-year
career. As a result, the mere mention of our name evokes giggles,
guffaws or more. Being named Jeff Stryker is like being wired with an
ultra sensitive “gaydar” device — I can usually tell which team people
play on by how they react to the mere mention of my name. With
Stryker’s “hilarious erotic comedy” coming to my backyard, I braced
myself for more than the usual ribbing. Overnight, the whole town was
festooned with “Jeff Stryker Does Hard Time” posters, with pictures of
the star behind bars and the fetching tagline, “On the Inside, It’s Not
Your Back You Have to Watch, It’s Your Butt.”
I was Jeff Stryker first. My parents gave me the name after
carefully deliberating to find a moniker unlikely to be twisted into
mean-spirited childhood rhymes or playground taunts. It worked for a
while, at least until Jeff Stryker chose my name over the somewhat
dorkier handle his parents had provided — Charles Peyton. With the help
of his very own Svengali, porn producer John Travis, Jeff Stryker has
taken my name and made it synonymous with erotic excitement.
Although the occasional upstart (say, Ryan Idol) nips at his
heels, Stryker remains on top, literally and figuratively, in an
industry where careers tend to be measured in months or years, not
decades. He is a name-above-the-title star, with famed videos such as
“Bigger than Life,” “Powertool” and “Stryker Force” contributing to his
proud oeuvre of more than two dozen porn flicks (gay and straight).
Along with the movies comes a line of Jeff Stryker products — playing
cards, T-shirts, greeting cards, a CD (yes, he “sings”) and Stryker
Lube (“what that massive super hung Jeff uses for his huge cock to get
into those tight little assholes. Water based, moisturizing, lube gel
with aloe vera and vitamin E. Safe with condoms!” trumpets the ad copy).
Although Jeff Stryker’s notoriety is mostly among gay men, every
so often his antics fly on to the radar screen of mainstream popular
culture. One such incident involved a lawsuit over the marketing of his
famed “Jeff Stryker Cock and Balls” — the dildo fashioned
from a cast of his erect penis. This popular “rubber good” retails for
a pricey $59.95, showcased in an attractively designed box with a faux
velvet pouch. When Jeff Stryker appeared in court to sue the
manufacturer and distributor of his most famous attribute, even the Los
Angeles Times took note, in an article on wacky lawsuits entitled, “The
Scales of Justice Weigh Some Very Odd Things.” Odd things indeed.
Stryker claimed that the companies had ripped him off, breaching his
contract and misappropriating what his lawyers at one point referred to as his “intellectual property.”
Judge Eric Younger made no secret of the fact that he thought
the dispute was “beneath the dignity” of his court. Finding no legal
grounds to toss it out, Judge Younger swallowed hard and heard the case,
at one point noting that the array of dildos in evidence looked like so
many cordless phones. Ultimately, Judge Younger brokered a deal
between the litigants, granting the defendant companies’ request to
dismiss the lawsuit when they agreed to pay Stryker $25,000.
The Jeff Stryker dildo has taken on a life of its own. Not only
has it been litigated, it has been celebrated in highbrow fiction and
deconstructed by culture critics. Consider the hilarious opening scene
of Allan Gurganus’ “Plays Well with Others.” Hartley Mims Jr., the
narrator of this tale of gay life in 1980s New York, visits the
apartment of his friend Robert who is in the hospital with AIDS. With
Robert’s parents on the way from Iowa, Hartley sets about to “straighten
up” the place. The first task is to get rid of the three dozen or so
dildos “piled high, like cordwood” in the broom closet. Hartley surveys
the collection. “Some, I recognized, were actual casts from living porn
stars; there was a Jeff Stryker, a monster, but somehow Roman in its
genial fluted civic beauty.”
“Roman in its genial fluted civic beauty.” It rolls off the
tongue.
Or ponder this paper topic from a 1995 Bowling Green State
University Conference in Cultural Studies: “Lesbian Pornography and
Transformation: Foucault, Bourdieu, and de Certeau Make Sense of the
Jeff Stryker Dildo,” presented by Mary T. Conway, then a graduate
student at Temple University. The title says it all. It is Jeff
Stryker’s world; we just live in it.
I am often asked about the confusion surrounding our identities.
Do we share any attributes other than our name? Well, certainly. I’m a
gay man; he’s a gay icon. On the dimensions question, well, suffice it to
say we’re both 5 feet 9 and a half inches. We both seek fame and approval, trying to
stoke our respective images as porn god and erstwhile pundit.
What amazes me is that after 15 years on the porn scene,
Jeff Stryker is still going strong. Talk about staying power. With
this doppelgdnger/parallel universe thing going on, it sometimes feels
like the “Picture of Dorian Gray.” The yours truly Jeff Stryker could be
the portrait on the wall — approaching middle age with warp speed,
showing all the signs of wear and tear. While I age, the other Jeff
Stryker has some kind of Dick Clark thing going on. Perhaps it is the
hour he works out every day to maintain his famous figure. (He admits that he refuses to shower at the gym, for fear he might cause a riot.
His fellow gym bunnies might “storm the locker room,” he worried aloud
in a cover story interview a decade ago in The Advocate.)
With the advent of the Internet, I’ve had a whole new rash of
intertwined identity issues to confront. Vainglorious twins, each Jeff
Stryker has his own personal Web site. His keeps track of his personal
appearances, helps salacious surfers find the latest in Jeff Stryker
merchandise and offers extra nasties for “Gold Card” members who pay a
monthly premium. The Jeff Stryker name is such a lure that scores of
porn sites use “Jeff Stryker” as a metatag, posting the name hundreds
of times invisibly behind a site, knowing it will bring more traffic.
My Web site is practically Presbyterian by contrast, just a
straightforward digital risumi, with sample columns and clips. I posted
it with the conceit that Tina Brown or David Remnick would surf by, see
my stuff and option an article or two.
That is a fantasy yet realized. Jeff Stryker did
make it into the New Yorker once, however. Alas, it was my
doppelgdnger, featured in a quite depressing article about the porn
industry by Susan Faludi (“The Money Shot”). My New Yorker debut is
still probably some ways off. Although we live in different worlds, I
cannot help but feel competitive with my namesake, longing for the day
when someone can ask whether I am the Jeff Stryker and I can answer
“Yes” with a straight face.
By now, most of America knows what happened to Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was pistol-whipped, lashed to a fence and left to die Oct. 6. No one knows yet why Shepard was murdered. But statements made to the press and prosecutors hint at the direction the defense might be tempted to take this case — down a road that has been too well traveled in American jurisprudence.
Accused murderer Aaron McKinney’s girlfriend, Kristen Price, told reporters that robbery was the motive for the crime, but not the only one. Shepard, she says, embarrassed her boyfriend and his friend, Russell Henderson, by making a pass at them in the bar, setting the other patrons to “snickering.” “He said that he was gay and wanted to get with Aaron and Russ,” Price told ABC’s 20/20. Her friends killed Shepard “to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people,” she said.
The idea that it might be somehow permissible to “teach a lesson” about the perils of flirting by beating and killing a gay man is not as far-fetched as it might sound. In fact, this notion has proven persuasive in courtrooms around the country.
The “homosexual advance” defense can reduce murder charges to manslaughter, if self-defense can be proven or if it can be shown that the killing took place in the “heat of passion.” A related defense, known as “homosexual panic,” is part of an insanity or diminished capacity plea. The homosexual panic defense, according to the editors of a Harvard Law Review sexual orientation law primer, “is premised on the theory that a person with latent homosexual tendencies will have an extreme and uncontrollably violent reaction when confronted with a homosexual proposition.”
These defenses have been asserted in numerous cases to acquit or, more typically, to reduce the sentences of gay bashers. The Harvard editors stress that “[e]ven when defendants … do not raise homosexual panic as a defense, the admission of evidence of a victim’s homosexuality often results in undue lenience towards such defendants.” It’s as if gay men “ask for it” by their behavior or their mere existence — just as rape victims were stigmatized in the not-so-distant past.
Last week in Oahu, Hawaii, the day before Matthew Shepard died, the island’s gay and lesbian community held a candlelight vigil in memory of Kenneth Brewer, a gay man who was beaten to death last year. Stephen Bright, 30, met the former hotel executive in a gay bar and went home with him. Bright beat Brewer to death when, he maintained, Brewer came at him without his clothes on and made a sexual advance. A jury found Bright guilty of third-degree assault in the killing and sentenced him to one year in prison. He will be released next month. Gay rights groups have called for a “trial autopsy” of the case to see why a killing would yield such a slap on the wrist.
The extent to which homosexual advance or panic defenses are relied upon is not easy to gauge. The reported cases, involving written decisions handed down on appeal, are relatively few. Yet as the law review editors noted, even where such defenses are not explicitly asserted, gay victims’ sexuality often plays an unacknowledged role in the disposition of criminal cases.
In Roanoke, Va., Christopher Wilson’s parents now regret going along with the prosecutor’s offer of a plea bargain in their son’s 1996 murder. To avoid a trial and a public inquiry into their gay son’s sexual life, they acquiesced to prosecutors’ acceptance of a plea of no contest to first degree murder and robbery. The killer, Christopher Saul, was sentenced last year to 42 years in prison for beating the 25-year-old Wilson to death with a crescent wrench and a car jack.
More than 50 pieces of evidence had been gathered in preparing for Saul’s murder trial. Mary and Jerry Wilson had hoped for a life sentence or the death penalty for their son’s killer. “I don’t think we let him down; I think the justice system did,” Mary Wilson told the Roanoke Times & World News. “We were told [defense lawyers] would use everything they could to drag his name through the mud.” The lead investigator on the case told the paper, “Unfortunately, even though we’re in 1997, there was a fear that based on his lifestyle, a jury would believe he got what he deserved.”
Nor is it only Virginia jurors who cannot be trusted to set aside their anti-gay biases. Judges, too, have been taken to task for attitudes that deny the humanity of gay victims of violent crimes.
In 1988, at a sentencing hearing for a defendant convicted of killing two gay men, Texas Judge Jack Hampton handed down a 30-year sentence rather than the life sentence requested by the prosecutor. His rationale? “I don’t much care for queers cruising the streets picking up teenage boys …[I] put prostitutes and gays at about the same level … and I’d be hard put to give somebody life for killing a prostitute.”
In 1987, Daniel Wan was beaten up outside of a bar in Broward County, Fla., by assailants who called him faggot, repeatedly kicking him and throwing him up against a moving car. He died from his injuries two days later. At a pre-trial hearing, Circuit Judge Daniel Futch jokingly asked the prosecuting attorney, “That’s a crime now, to beat up a homosexual?” The prosecutor responded, “Yes, sir. And it’s a crime to kill them.” To that, the judge quipped, “Times really have changed.” Although the judge apologized and maintained he was kidding, he was removed from the case.
Times may be changing; such outrageous expressions of judicial bias no longer go unchallenged. Moreover, hate crimes are now reported and tallied pursuant to a patchwork of state laws. Forty states have such laws (Wyoming is not among them); 11 mention sexual orientation.
As gay activists, criminologists and police officials look for ways to prevent and prosecute gay-bashing, psychologists and sociologists seek to understand its origins.
Although the slaying of Matthew Shepard may have been unique in its brutality, it fit the common profile of a gay bashing — young men singling out a gay victim for sport. There are even slang terms for the practice that make it sound like something worthy of ESPN coverage: “quail hunting” or “fag rolling.”
Although some commentators have criticized the “homosexual panic” defense as more of a cultural expression than a proper psychological explanation, some researchers believe that in addition to thrill seeking or ideological opposition to homosexuality, gay bashers may be motivated by a fear of their own suppressed homosexual urges.
Henry Adams and his colleagues in the psychology department at the University of Georgia devised a way to put this hypothesis to the test. For a study published in the “Journal of Abnormal Psychology” they recruited a group of 64 men between the ages of 18 and 31, dividing them into groups of homophobic and nonhomophobic subjects on the basis of their scores on an “Index of Homophobia” test. The subjects were then shown explicit erotic videos depicting straight, gay male and lesbian sex.
While watching the videos, the subjects were hooked up to a plethysmograph, a device that measures changes in penile circumference. The homophobic subjects’ stirring penises sent the needle on the plethysmograph twitching — 80 percent of the homophobic participants showed “moderate to definite tumescence” while viewing the male homosexual video, compared to a third of the nonhomophobic men. Although the plethysmograph doesn’t lie, the homophobic subjects did, denying to the researchers (and perhaps themselves) that they were aroused.
It would be armchair psychobabble to assume that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were dealing with their deep-seated homosexual urges in singling out Matthew Shepard. However, the search for motive and the urge to place the Shepard case in the context of the broader social disopprobrium of homosexuality remains. There will be plenty of blame to go around. Back when the nation’s attention was riveted on the “Jenny Jones” murder — when Jonathan Schmitz fired a shotgun point blank into Scott Amedure’s chest because Amedure had revealed on the Jones show that he had a crush on Schmitz — pundits blathered on about the sorry state of talk TV, mostly missing the point.
Erik Piepenburg, writing in the Chicago Tribune, got it: “By calling the show a ‘humiliating ambush,’ our society and the news media reinforce the notion that an innocuous revelation of a same-sex crush is such an embarrassment that defense of one’s masculinity and/or heterosexuality — even through violence — is acceptable, even necessary. But would a show on interracial crushes have been referred to as ‘humiliating?’ If a white man had killed a secret African-American female admirer, would a jury have had sympathy for the killer’s racial insecurities?”
As long as claims of “humiliation” and “panic” can evoke sympathy and lesser sentences for gay-bashers, more such violence can be expected.
“They’re having litters. They are literally having litters.”
Barbara Harris is not talking about puppies or kittens, but about addicted women who have given birth to five, 10 or 15
drug-exposed children, despite being unwilling or unable to care for them.
And Harris is not just mad as hell — she is trying, almost single-handedly,
to do something about it. Last year, she founded CRACK (Children
Requiring a Caring Kommunity), a nonprofit organization in Anaheim, Calif., that
offers $200 to any
drug-addicted or alcoholic mother who agrees to be sterilized or have Norplant
implanted, or to any male drug addict or alcoholic who has a vasectomy.
“I’m not saying these women are animals,” she hastens to add.
Nevertheless, her words can’t help but evoke images of animal shelters that
offer pet owners a few dollars to encourage them to spay or neuter
their animals. The idea also seems uncomfortably close to
population control efforts such as Peru’s program to sterilize poor women by offering them small gifts as bait. Harris’ proposal is certainly in a
similar vein: Why not see
if money will convince parents addicted to crack, heroin,
alcohol or speed not to bring any more children into the world?
“I’ve never taken on anything else like this,” says Harris, an engaging woman in her mid-40s, as we sit in her office at CRACK’s utilitarian headquarters, a couple of rooms in a
medical office
building nestled in a vast expanse of strip malls. “When I was in high
school, I wouldn’t even get up
in class to give a report, I would rather get an ‘F’ — that’s how shy I
was. People who know me can’t believe I am doing this.”
Harris got involved when she and her
husband, Smitty, parents of a blended family of six boys, decided they
wanted a girl and opted for the one sure-fire method: foster care. That is how Destiny, the 8-month-old daughter of a crack-addicted
mother, came into their lives. Destiny soon had a new baby brother. Would
the Harrises be
interested in taking him in too? And so it went until Barbara and
Smitty Harris had adopted Destiny, Isiah, Taylor and Brandon — babies
No. 5, 6, 7 and 8 from the same mother.
The idea that Destiny’s mom “was allowed to just visit her local
hospital yearly and drop off her damaged babies and nobody would even
give her a slap on the hand” rankled Harris, who says that several of the
children were born addicted and had to suffer through withdrawal as
infants. Harris never met Destiny’s birth mother, but as she took more and
more of the woman’s children into her home, the plight of babies such as
Destiny became her cause.
In a flannel shirt and jeans, this day Harris looks more soccer mom
than working mother, although her life gives new meaning to the phrase
“second shift.” On a typical business
day, she fields press calls, raises money, juggles a board of
directors and plays social worker, all between the hours of 8 and
10:30 in the morning, then bolts home to take care of
the children.
Harris began her crusade by asking nurses, police and social workers
if she could do
something, anything, to break this cycle of despair — even if it meant
making a citizen’s arrest. When she was told there was nothing she
could do, she became a “faxing fool.” Shy no more, she convinced a California state Assembly member, Phil Hawkins, to
introduce a
bill to make it a crime to give birth to a drug baby.
When the bill died
in committee, she took her plea to the media, making her case
in the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times. She appeared on
“Oprah” and became a
darling of talk radio hosts and newspaper pundits across the nation –
among them San Diego radio personality Rick Roberts, now a CRACK board
member, who had gained national attention for reading the names of Megan’s
Law sex offenders on the air, and Dr. Laura
Schlessinger, who has donated $5,000 to the CRACK coffers and frequently
touts the program on her radio therapy show.
In the center of an emotionally charged issue, Harris is an effective
advocate, all the more so because she has
“walked the walk” with her adopted family. The reaction of Orlando Sentinel
columnist Kathleen Parker is typical. “Everybody complains … Then one day,
somebody actually does
something,” Parker wrote in her syndicated column last December. “Not a
bureaucrat, not a politician, not a social worker.
Just somebody who is sick and tired of watching the tragedy unfold while
everybody else comes up with reasons why we can’t do anything. Barbara
Harris of Stanton, Calif., is my hero.” Conservative radio host and Denver Post columnist Ken Hamblin was equally impassioned. “[Harris'] words of wisdom
and tough love
seem to be lost on the bleeding heart feminist liberals,” he wrote in December.
“I say 200 bucks is a minuscule sum to spend if it will prevent a junkie from
contributing another baby to the junk heap of urban poverty and human
misery.”
- – - – - – - – - -
Yet while Harris may have touched a nerve with the public, critics
question whether her solution is effective, much less ethical. So far,
CRACK’s numbers are sufficiently modest to border on the symbolic. There
have been 13 drug-addicted clients, all women, who have chosen sterilization over the less permanent Norplant option. Prior to being
sterilized, these 13 women
had given birth to 78 children: Six were stillborn, two died after birth
and 64 are now in
foster care — “being supported by taxpayers,” Harris is quick to note.
With about 6 percent of all newborns exposed in utero to illegal drugs
(according to the National Institutes of Drug Abuse’s estimate for 1992,
the last year for which statistics are available), Harris’ program has thus made a
tiny dent in a big problem.
But it is a big enough dent for some to question who Harris is to play God. “To
have somebody out there doing these kinds of things that have to do
with creation of life or termination of life is way too
presumptuous,” says Melanie Blum, an Orange County attorney who specializes
in reproductive rights and infertility cases. “To sterilize part of the
population because you can afford to do so, it is just not her decision … to make.”
For Blum, it doesn’t make much difference that it is a private
citizen and a nonprofit organization — not the
government — offering the incentive. If paying people not to have children
is legal, Blum suggests, perhaps it shouldn’t be: “We prevent certain
private
contracts in this country — you can’t buy and sell children, for example.
We prevent certain things because it is against public policy.”
“The $200 is just a bribe,” adds Jon Dunn, the CEO and
president of Planned Parenthood of San Bernardino and Orange counties.
“Drug-addicted women are effectively being coerced because of their
desperation for money for drugs. It is using their circumstances to
exploit them.” Rocio
Cordoba, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of
Southern California, agrees. “She is
targeting a very discrete, vulnerable population of women who have few
options.”
To Harris, however, obsessing too much about
women’s reproductive rights is what got us here in the first place — and
that singular focus has obscured the needs of the real vulnerable population, children. “We have more
compassion for animals than we do for kids,” Harris fumes. “What about the
babies that
are dying? Don’t get me wrong, it is nice to live in America, but we are
messed up. Our rights are going to be our biggest
downfall.” Harris makes no bones about her own singular focus, however: Her program is
about the children, not women or their rights.
This aspect of CRACK strikes
many as cynical, both in its conception and execution — an image that
is not redeemed by the unvarnished message on the program’s flyers:
“Don’t Let Pregnancy Ruin Your Drug Habit.” The payment is a one-time
offering, with no provision for follow-up. “We would be more supportive of a program that would actually
address the underlying problems,” says Cordoba.
Harris readily admits that some of her clients might use the $200 to buy
more drugs. But she does not subscribe to the conventional wisdom
that addiction is a disease — a fact that raises the ire of equally outspoken critics on the left
and has cost her support from some in medicine and public health. Next to Cordoba, who describes the women Harris is targeting in a way that makes
drug addiction seem like a visitation, Harris sounds callous. “If
they are drug addicts, they are drug addicts by choice,” Harris says. “People
say it is a disease, fine. But it is a disease of choice — however they
got there and whatever their background and however screwed up their life is. The babies don’t have a choice.”
Harris’ simple — some would say facile — solution has also raised charges of racism. Dr. Xylina Bean, chief neonatologist at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical center in Los Angeles, told the L.A. Times that she believes the program focuses on minority communities, feeding “latent racism” — although about half of CRACK’s clients have been white. And while Harris is white, her husband, Smitty, is African-American, as are their adopted children.
Harris’ critics also warn about the slippery slope. “Today it is
targeting and criminalizing drug abuse, but what will it be tomorrow?” asks the ACLU’s
Cordoba. “If you take it to its logical conclusion, you could have a
program or
policy that monitors the kind of food a woman eats while she is
pregnant, or whether she exercises enough, or whether she has a glass of
wine or a cup of coffee.” Blum voices similar concerns. “Where does it
stop? Next do we start sterilizing people who don’t take their
multivitamins?”
Harris dismisses the naysayers, laughing off the idea that
discouraging crack addicts from having babies will inevitably lead to jailing
pregnant coffee drinkers. A more valid concern, however, is
whether the program really addresses the problem. “Crack
moms” may be a convenient and sensational target, says Deborah Mathieu, author of “Preventing Prenatal Harm: Should the State
Intervene?” (second edition, 1996), but alcohol probably poses a much worse threat to the fetus. And alcohol and tobacco use
during pregnancy are far more widespread — according to the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, 18 percent of newborns have been
exposed to
alcohol in utero and 20 percent to tobacco, nearly four times the number
exposed to illegal drugs. In addition, says Mathieu, recent
research suggests that the impact of in utero drug exposure may not
be as dramatic, or as long-term, as was once feared. “Crack itself
is not the
main danger,” says Mathieu. “The main danger is being brought up by an addict.”
Harris’ critics complain that the decision-making capacity of the
women her program targets is so impaired by
drug use that any consent to undergo sterilization is suspect. Harris’ answer is CRACK client Sharon Adams.
“I am not ashamed
of how many kids I’ve had,” Adams tells me when we talk. “I am not ashamed
to tell anyone I was on
dope. I hit bottom, rock bottom. I’ve been raped, I’ve been shot, I’ve been
to prison. I was close to death.”
Herself the
14th of 14 children, Adams had given birth to 13
children, all of whom have ended up in foster care, in prison or dead. She is hard
pressed to say why the 14th was a charm, but when she became
pregnant again, she decided she would try to
stop “chasing the rock” and get clean. She did.
A nurse at the hospital where she was due to deliver her son encouraged Adams to be sterilized and gave her a CRACK flier. “I
didn’t care. Money or not, I still wanted my tubes
tied,” says Adams. She used most of the $200 to buy things for her baby. “I told him, ‘Kendall, you’re the last
button
on Gabriel’s coat and I’m going to use this on you.’”
Although Adams is not exactly the target CRACK client — she had
already made her decision, and the $200 was just a little more incentive –
she has become a veritable poster child for the program, appearing with
Harris on radio and TV. And she has no regrets about her decision. “It is possible that you could regret it,” she admits, “but I tell women to have
a level
head and do it for yourself, nobody else.”
Ironically, if the law Harris had lobbied for two years ago had passed in California, Adams might now be behind bars instead of raising her son and doing public relations for Harris’ program. Yet that solution may not be so far-fetched: In May, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a 1989
South Carolina
statute that made drug use by pregnant women a crime. With that kind of momentum, Harris is making plans to go national with CRACK, predicting that the nation is ready for her $200 solution. “Nobody should have a problem with it,” she says. “Not anyone who has a
heart, anyway.”
