The Kara Neumann case was an incident in which parents of a sick child refused to treat her with anything other than prayer, resulting in the child's death. The 11-year-old child, Madeline Kara Neumann, of Weston, Wisconsin, died of undiagnosed diabetes [1] on March 23, 2008, after Kara's parents, Leilani and Dale Neumann, prayed for their dying daughter instead of seeking medical help. The parents were Pentecostals who did not belong to an organized religion. They had obtained medical care in the past, but had come to believe that there are spiritual root causes to sickness and that prayer and strong religious beliefs will cure any health problems. They decided not to go to doctors for treatment anymore, out of a belief that they would be "putting the doctor before God", amounting to idolatry and sin. [2]
The parents were charged with second-degree reckless homicide by the Marathon County district attorney [3] in separate trials. Dale Neumann was convicted on May 22, 2009, and Leilani was convicted on August 1, 2009. [4] [5] [6] On October 6, 2009, both parents were sentenced to 10 years of probation, with six months jail time to be served over a six-year period. [2] On July 3, 2013, by a 6-to-1 margin the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the convictions. [2] [7] Kara Neumann's case sparked renewed discussion about faith healing in the United States.[ citation needed ]
Faith healing is the practice of prayer and gestures that are believed by some to elicit divine intervention in spiritual and physical healing, especially the Christian practice. Believers assert that the healing of disease and disability can be brought about by religious faith through prayer or other rituals that, according to adherents, can stimulate a divine presence and power. Religious belief in divine intervention does not depend on empirical evidence of an evidence-based outcome achieved via faith healing. Virtually all scientists and philosophers dismiss faith healing as pseudoscience.
William Marrion Branham was an American Christian minister and faith healer who initiated the post-World War II healing revival, and claimed to be a prophet with the anointing of Elijah, who had come to prelude Christ's second coming; some of his followers have been labeled a "doomsday cult". He is credited as "a principal architect of restorationist thought" for charismatics by some Christian historians, and has been called the "leading individual in the Second Wave of Pentecostalism." He made a lasting influence on televangelism and the modern charismatic movement, and his "stage presence remains a legend unparalleled in the history of the Charismatic movement".
Wisconsin v. Jonas Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), is the case in which the United States Supreme Court found that Amish children could not be placed under compulsory education past 8th grade. The parents' fundamental right to freedom of religion was determined to outweigh the state's interest in educating their children. The case is often cited as a basis for parents' right to educate their children outside of traditional private or public schools.
Anna Elisabeth "Anneliese" Michel was a German woman who underwent 67 Catholic exorcism rites during the year before her death. She died of malnutrition, for which her parents and priest were convicted of negligent homicide. She was diagnosed with epileptic psychosis and had a history of psychiatric treatment that proved ineffective.
Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily during the 1980s and early 1990s, and featured charges against day-care providers accused of committing several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse. The collective cases are often considered a part of the Satanic panic. A 1982 case in Kern County, California, United States, first publicized the issue of day-care sexual abuse, and the issue figured prominently in news coverage for almost a decade. The Kern County case was followed by cases elsewhere in the United States, as well as Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and various European countries.
Dale Shawn Hausner and Samuel John Dieteman were a duo of serial killers who committed several drive-by shootings and arsons in Phoenix, Arizona, between May 2005 and August 2006. They targeted random pedestrians and animals, mostly doing so while under the influence of methamphetamine, and also set fire to multiple objects. Investigators believe they were responsible for eight murders and at least 29 other shootings. The investigation of their crimes coincided with the search for the Baseline Killer, who was also committing random murders and sexual assaults in the Phoenix area.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Charles Randal Smith is a former Canadian pathologist known for performing flawed child autopsies that resulted in wrongful convictions.
Georgia v. Smith was a court case held in 2007 resulting in the conviction of Joseph and Sonya Smith for child abuse and murder following the death of one of their sons, Josef Smith, from "acute and chronic" corporal punishment. The couple, who lived in Mableton, Georgia, prior to their incarceration were each sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison, the maximum sentence.
Commonwealth v. Twitchell, 416 Mass. 114, 617 N.E.2d 609 (1993), was the most prominent of a series of criminal cases, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which parents who were members of the Christian Science church were prosecuted for the deaths of children whose medical conditions had been treated only by Christian Science prayer.
Caylee Marie Anthony was an American toddler who lived in Orlando, Florida, with her mother, Casey Marie Anthony, and her maternal grandparents, George and Cindy Anthony. On July 15, 2008, Caylee was reported missing in a 9-1-1 call made by Cindy, who said she had not seen the child for thirty-one days. According to what Cindy told police dispatchers, Casey had given varied explanations as to Caylee's whereabouts before eventually saying she had not seen her daughter for weeks. Casey later called police and falsely told a dispatcher that Caylee had been kidnapped by a nanny on June 9. Casey was charged with first-degree murder in October 2008 and pleaded not guilty.
Dennis Raymond Ferguson was an Australian sex offender convicted of child sexual abuse. In 1988, he kidnapped and sexually abused three children, and was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. Ferguson was forced by public hostility and news media attention to relocate his residence on numerous occasions, from various locations in New South Wales and Queensland.
Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD) was from 1983 to 2017 an American nonprofit membership organization that worked to stop child abuse and neglect based on religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and quackery. CHILD opposed religious exemptions from child health and safety laws. These exemptions have been used as a defense in criminal cases when parents have withheld lifesaving medical care on religious grounds. These exemptions also have discouraged reporting and investigation of religion-based medical neglect of children and spawned many outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases and deaths. CHILD publicized the ideological abuse and neglect of children, lobbied for equal protection laws for children, and filed lawsuits and amicus curiae briefs in related cases.
Jesus C. Gonzalez is an American man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, known for a gun rights civil lawsuit, as well as being convicted of a reckless homicide shooting.
Lisa A. Biron is a disbarred attorney from Manchester, New Hampshire, and a convicted child molester and child pornographer. In November 2012, she was indicted on federal charges related to the sexual exploitation of her 14-year-old daughter, including taking her to Canada to have sex with a man there. She was convicted on all charges in a January 2013 trial, and was sentenced that May to 40 years in prison.
Kenneth "Ken" R. Kratz is a former American lawyer who served as district attorney of Calumet County, Wisconsin. He gained attention for trying a highly publicized homicide case, State of Wisconsin v. Steven Avery (2007), in which Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey were both convicted. The trial served as the subject of Making a Murderer (2015), a 10-episode documentary series produced by Netflix.
Ashlee Anne Rose Martinson is an American woman convicted of the 2015 murders of her mother and stepfather, which she committed the day after her 17th birthday. Martinson's case received international attention. Martinson later pleaded guilty to two counts of second degree intentional homicide and was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Ronald Eugene Woodham IV was a formerly unidentified American baby and homicide victim whose body was found off of South Carolina Highway 544, on the outskirts of Conway in Horry County, South Carolina on December 4, 2008. Known as "Baby Boy Horry" while unidentified, his case remained cold for over 11 years, until his parents were identified in March 2020. His mother, Jennifer Sahr, left him in a box on the side of Highway 544, leaving him to die of hypothermia. Sahr was arrested in March 2020, and pleaded guilty to manslaughter in his death in 2022. In June 2023, she was sentenced to 4 years in prison.
Donald Banfield was a British man who disappeared from his home in Harrow, London in suspicious circumstances on 11 May 2001. His case is notable for being a rare case in which a murder conviction was secured without a body, and for this conviction being subsequently quashed on the grounds that a joint enterprise conviction in such a case where no body was found was not viable, though the defence themselves remarked that the "likelihood" was that "one or other" of the two suspects in the case had murdered him.