A former cheerleader was foundacquitted of killing her newbornbecause prosecutors never were able to prove the child was alive at the time of its birth, says an expert who followed the case.
The woman,Brooke Skylar Richardson, now 20, was acquitted Thursday of aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment. Jurors found her guilty only of one charge — gross abuse of a corpse — after Richardsonadmitted to burying the bodyin the backyard of her family’s Ohio home in July 2017, when she was 18.
“In this case, what they were relying on were statements that she made during police questioning that either implied, indicated or sometimes inferred the child was alive,” he says.
“The defense and their experts did a wonderful job of undermining any of the credibility of any of those statements,” he says. “They were able to convincingly present that Skylar was vulnerable to manipulative police questioning, and as a result, really cast doubt on whether anything that she told police was, in fact, true.”
Greg Lynch/The Journal-News via AP
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In particular, the allegation that Richardson had attempted to cremate the body was suspect from the start, he says.
“The problem is, that information turned out to be wrong,” he says. “Even the state’s own expert had to admit that there was no charring.”
“When the jury learned that [Richardson] was willing to admit to that falsity,” he says, “I think anything else was unbelievable for them.”
Nick Graham/The Journal-News via AP
At a news conference after Richardson was indicted, the prosecutor “talked about the abuse that was done to this child … [and] about some of the things that they, at the time, believed she did,” says Gallagher.
Prosecutors argued that Richardson did not want to be a single teen mom with college only a few months away. In the weeks after learning of her pregnancy,Richardson didn’t return for an ultrasound, bloodwork, or any other treatment, while also ignoring calls from the doctor and assistants, prosecutors alleged.
Yet in general the case “exposes some of the problems with police questioning practices, and I also think it calls into question what I think is a prosecution that was unwilling to sort of reset itself,” says Gallagher.
Even with that information ahead of the trial, “the prosecution never really took a second look at its case and re-evaluated,” says Gallagher. “It had already sort of committed to a narrative that was created very early on.”
That narrative is what sunk them, he says, because the defense found it easy to puncture holes in the story.
source: people.com
