Pubdate: Sat, 15 Mar 2008
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: 10, Section A
Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Adam Nossiter

IN ALABAMA, A CRACKDOWN ON PREGNANT DRUG USERS

ANDALUSIA, Ala. -- A day after she gave birth in 2006, Tiffany 
Hitson, 20, sat on her front porch crying, barefoot and handcuffed. A 
police officer hovered in the distance.

Ms. Hitson's newborn daughter had traces of cocaine and marijuana in 
its system, and the young woman, baby-faced herself, had fallen afoul 
of a tough new state law intended to protect children from drugs, and 
a local prosecutor bent on pursuing it. She made arrangements for the 
baby's care, and headed off to a year behind bars.

"I couldn't believe it," recalled Ms. Hitson, who was released in 
November after spending much of the first year of her daughter's life 
at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama.

Two worlds are colliding in this piney woods backcountry in southern 
Alabama: casual drug use and a local district attorney unsettled that 
children or fetuses might be affected by it. The result is an unusual 
burst of prosecutions in which young women using drugs are shocked to 
find themselves in the cross hairs for harming their children, even 
before giving birth.

Over an 18-month period, at least eight women have been prosecuted 
for using drugs while pregnant in this rural jurisdiction of barely 
37,000, a tally without any recent parallel that women's advocates 
have been able to find. The district attorney, Greg L. Gambril, 
acknowledges the number puts him at the "forefront," at least among 
Alabama prosecutors. Similar cases have come up elsewhere, usually 
with limited success. But Alabama, and in particular this hilly, 
remote terrain just above the Florida Panhandle, is pursuing these 
cases with special vigor.

In Maryland, the state's highest court in 2006 threw out the 
convictions of two women whose babies were born with cocaine in their 
bloodstreams, ruling that punishment was not the right deterrent. 
Last year, the New Mexico Supreme Court rejected a woman's 
child-abuse conviction in a similar case, declaring a fetus was not a 
child. Some doctors and advocacy groups maintain that the effects of 
drugs on pregnant women and their fetuses are not fully known; in 
Alabama, though, these arguments have yet to be officially made.

A cultural clash, unfolding within the confined world of Covington 
County, is at the origin of this prosecutorial crusade. Here, unlike 
in other jurisdictions, women are not appealing their convictions, 
and lawyers and doctors talk about these cases reluctantly, if at 
all. Too many people know one another in these quiet little towns 
that fade abruptly into the countryside.

There has not been a murder here in over three years, the prosecutor 
said. But a year ago a newborn died at the local hospital, and the 
mother had traces of methamphetamines in her system. Doctors told the 
police that the infant's premature birth could be attributed to 
maternal drug use, and she was charged with "chemical endangerment of 
child," which carries a sentence of 10 years to life in prison.

"In my jurisdiction, a baby being born dead because of drug abuse is 
a huge deal," Mr. Gambril said.

Mr. Gambril makes little distinction between fetus and child. He said 
his duty was to protect both -- though the Alabama law he uses makes 
no reference to unborn children, and was primarily intended to 
protect youngsters from exposure to methamphetamine laboratories.

"When drugs are introduced in the womb, the child-to-be is 
endangered," Mr. Gambril said. "It is what I call a continuing 
crime." He added that the purpose of the statute was to guarantee 
that the child has "a safe environment, a drug-free environment."

"No one is to say whether that environment is inside or outside the 
womb," he said, and no judge or other authority in Alabama has so far 
disagreed.

Covington County is an isolated rural terrain where drugs are a 
recreational outlet in the absence of others, where the police found 
nearly 200 methamphetamine laboratories in the first years of the 
decade, and where they made more arrests for abusing the drug than 
anywhere else in the state.

"This is a meth town," said Ms. Hitson's grandmother, Shirley Hinson, 
who helped take care of the baby while Tiffany was in prison. 
Speaking of youth here, Ms. Hinson said, "There's nothing for them to do."

The county is the kind of place where young women -- white, 
working-class, on probation for other offenses -- sometimes take a 
chance while pregnant.

"I made the biggest mistake of my life & did some drugs with her 
father right before I went into labor, unaware I was about to have 
her," Ms. Hitson wrote to the court from the Covington County Jail, 
in neat schoolgirl script, pleading to be released after her arrest 
in October 2006. "Please, please let me spend this most important 
time with my baby," she wrote.

But the judge had set bond at $200,000 -- Ms. Hitson had earlier been 
charged in connection with a break-in, and with credit-card fraud -- 
and in jail she stayed.

The environment can be unforgiving. Rachel Barfoot, 31, who had been 
charged before with beating her niece, told her probation officer 
that she was pregnant. When she tested positive for cocaine, she was arrested.

"I was in shock," said Ms. Barfoot. "I told the truth, but the truth 
got me nowhere," she said in an interview. Three months pregnant, 
already a mother of four, she spent five weeks in the Covington County Jail.

"It was hell," said Ms. Barfoot, now jobless and struggling. Police 
affidavits make it clear that local doctors are cooperating in these 
investigations.

The women are sent off to county jails, state prisons, or drug 
rehabilitation clinics, and often emerge bitter at the collaboration 
of police, prosecutors, judges, doctors and social workers they say 
is less keen on help -- Mr. Gambril insists otherwise -- than punishment.

"In Covington County, I don't think they're interested in helping 
mothers," Ms. Hitson said. "They're just sending people straight to 
prison. It doesn't help their drug problems."

A few of the local defense lawyers express similar sentiments: "None 
of those cases should have been brought," said Rod Sylvester, who 
represents another woman charged with chemical endangerment. "It's an 
overreaching."

But others bring up the powerful, unspoken community sanction against 
the combination of drugs and pregnant women. And so far, none of the 
women have risked trial.

"Our ultimate goal is to protect mothers and children," Mr. Gambril said.

Meanwhile, Shirley Hinson, Ms. Hitson's grandmother, is still furious 
over Tiffany's year of imprisonment. "They took something away from 
my granddaughter and my grandbaby they can't give back," she said. 
"They made an example out of Tiffany. That's all they did." 
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