This note contains details of domestic and child abuse that may offend readers’ sensibilities.
During the first hours of 2020, Rebecca Hogue arrived home after a grueling shift waitressing from hours in a casino in the city of Norman, in the state of Oklahoma .
The first thing she did was change and then she got into bed where her boyfriend and Ryder, her 2-year-old baby, were sleeping. The next thing was to fall into a deep sleep.
The next morning, she woke up and realized that the her son was not breathing. Her boyfriend, Christopher Trent, was at work. Then he called the police in a panic.
The images from the cameras carried by the rescuers who came to Hogue’s house that day show how she tried to apply first aid to the body of her baby, who was pronounced dead when she arrived at the hospital.
A coroner’s report concluded that the baby’s cause of death was blunt force trauma.
In addition to this, traces of Ryder’s hair were found on the wall of the house that Hogue shared with Trent.
Hogue said that she was unaware that anything had happened to the baby, so she called her boyfriend, begging him to meet her at the hospital urgently.
But he never replied. Not the calls, not the text messages. Nothing.
Four days later, police found Trent’s body in the Wichita Mountains, located in the southwestern Oklahoma. she Apparently she had committed suicide.
The truth is that a prosecutor, months later, left cclear that Ryder’s death had been caused by Trent.
Carved into a tree, near the spot where Trent’s body was found, were the words “Rebekah is innocent”.
But with Trent dead, the investigation settled on Hogue, who was charged and sentenced to serve 16 months in prison for the crime of murder
Why? Because, according to the legislation of some states, parents who fail to protect their children from abuse are accused of the same crime that is committed against minors.
Failure to protect
It is called the “Failure to protect” law, which exists in many US states and which It is the center of criticism because it criminalizes victims of domestic violence who fear fleeing that environment.
The case of Hogue attracted a lot of attention from women’s rights groups and the media, talking about the effects this has on defendants and the limitations of the law to actually carry justice for victims of domestic abuse.
The trial de Hogue took place last fall. To convince the jury, the prosecution needed to prove that she knew about the abuse being applied against the minor and that she did nothing to stop it.
Hogue told the police that she had no idea that Trent hit Ryder the day before, but that, shortly before his death, noticed that the child had unjustified injuries in on Body.
Hogue said that two weeks earlier he had noticed bumps and bruises of cuts on the child’s skin. He also indicated that he took photos of the bruises and searched for information on the internet to find out if your child had been beaten.
So when she confronted Trent about it, he told her that kids hit each other all the time playing and that caused them to bruise.
And two days before After Ryder’s death, while giving him a bath, Hogue noticed that the boy was lethargic. When talking to Trent, he told her that it must be that the child had the flu.
In his statement, Hogue admitted that he searched the internet not only for symptoms of the flu, but signs that your child may be being abused.
Hogue said that did those searches, because attracts “this kind of men“.
With these statements and the evidence from her internet searches, the prosecutor was able to prove that she knew that Trent was violently abusing her son and that somehow she never stopped him.
To which Hogue explained that she searched the internet for these types of signs because she wanted to be cautious, but in the end she believed the explanations of Trent on the bruises.
“She believed it because he manipulated her”, can be read in the police report.
The prosecution concluded that Hogue’s suspicions about the injuries and her allowing Trent to continue caring for Ryder were evidence that Hogue was guilty of “allowing the murder of his son”.
Lack of evidence
The truth is that much evidence was not allowed in the trial, which I agree Hogue’s attorney, Andrew Casey, may have helped her case.
For example, the words carved into the tree “Rebekah is innocent ” were considered as rumors and these images were prohibited from being distributed.
Along with this, the police detective who investigated the crime was not allowed to give his opinion on the case and an audio in the one that was caught arguing with a friend of Hogue’s was not accepted in court.
In the recording, obtained by the BBC, he admits that his team does not have enough evidence to charge Hogue with “lack of protection” of a crime of murder in the first degree.
“We do not believe in that accusation and there are serious options that she I ended up in jail for how the system works”, Detective Sean Judy can be heard saying.
The conversation was released by the newspaper Norman Transcript.
Neither Detective Judy, nor the police force of the Norman County, where the events occurred, agreed to comment on the audio.
To avoid obstacles in its strategy before the jury, the prosecutor’s office circumvented the police indictment by asking the jury to decide whether charges should be filed instead of filing a police charge.
This confusing maneuver is allowed in some US jurisdictions. In the end, the new jury decided in favor of the prosecution.
The prosecutor’s office in charge of the case did not respond to the questions posed by the BBC.
In addition to all this maneuvering, the jury did not allow hearing the testimony of an expert who spoke about how Hogue’s previous experiences of domestic violence could affected his judgment.
The reason for this was that in this case, Trent did not attack Hogue but the baby.
Express trial
During the trial, which lasted eight days, prosecutors repeatedly showed images of Ryder’s body covered in bruises. For example, they left during 10 minutes the image of the child’s genitals that were affected by Trent’s blows.
It took less than two hours for the jury to testify guilty to Hogue.
From the prison, where Hogue is awaiting sentencing, the woman says that these images continue to circulate in her head over and over again once.
“The things that were said in the trial are going to haunt me forever,” he told the BBC in a conversation held in the prison where she remains detained.
She grew up as an only child, so she only knew what it was to live with children when she herself gave birth to Ryder. She says that she was overwhelmed with how much she loved him. He still calls him his “best friend”.
“Even though he barely had 2 and a half years old, he already had a great sense of humor“, he says with a smile.
Without a criminal record, Hogue was faced with the possibility of passing decades in prison. The state of Oklahoma has the highest rate of women in prison.
The jury had recommended life imprisonment and, if this were the case, she would only be eligible for parole after serving 38 years of the sentence.
However, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections recommended that the deferment of the sentence be more appropriate. conviction, that she not be sent to prison and that she attend compulsory therapy.
In the end, a judge sentenced her to 12 months in jail, which means he will have to stay behind bars for another 13 months since he has been in this situation for three months.
Of course, all this worries him. But what torments her the most is that all the drama that took place in the trial is going to be superimposed on the memories of her son.
“ Ryder was lost in all this. No one is going to remember him as he was“, she says between tears.
“I don’t know why all this happened to us. I wonder all the time”.
Other cases
Hogue is not the only person who has been convicted of crimes committed by his partner.
Many US states have laws that punish the failure to protect a minor from abuse, either criminal or civil.
And the sentences range from attending therapy until spending years in jail.
In Oklahoma, it can be a life sentence.
An investigation by Buzzfeed found at least 28 cases in 11 states of mothers who were sentenced to spend 10 years in prison. Or more.
Cindene Pezzel, legal director of the US Foundation for the Defense of Battered Women. , said that although these laws were created to protect the lives of minors, they have served to punish women victims of domestic violence and separate dozens of families, causing more pain.
Pezzel points out that survivors of this type of violence are criminalized because they do not call the police, because they do not take their children to the hospital or because they do not get out of a bad relationship.
But the reality is that many victims of domestic violence fear that such actions may mean future retaliation.
“Everyone says ‘that’s what a mother or father should do, protect their child’. But really these victims are between choosing something very dangerous and something that is even more dangerous”, she says.
Although there are no clear statistics on how many women have been accused of this crime, Pezzell indicates that women are more likely to be charged for this than men.
In Oklahoma , near to 13% of confirmed cases of child abuse can be categorized as “failure to protect the child,” according to the Department of the Protection of Minors.
A report of the United States Civil Liberties Union, found that the 46% of the people sentenced in this category are women.
What Pezzel points out is that this is partly because women are the first protectors of children, but also because expectations on motherhood play a role in this disparity.
“It is difficult for people to believe that a mother does not know that her child has been abused. But to what standard are we subjecting these mothers? I have seen cases where the pediatrician sees no signs of abuse, the child dies and the mother is accused of failing to protect her.”
In some cases, this type of accusation can lead the person to have a sentence of more years in prison for not “being able to stop” the abuser, than the abuser himself.
In 2006, Tondalao Hall, a young woman from 19 years in this same state, Oklahoma, pleaded guilty of failing to protect a minor.
Her boyfriend, who frequently beat her and threatened her, broke the ribs of one of her daughters and injured the other children of the woman.
He was sentenced to 10 years suspended and spent just two years in prison.
She, in return, paid 15 years in jail until his story came out in the media after an investigation by the portal Buzzfeed, which caused the parole committee to pardon the initial conviction of 30 years of prison and set her free.
By the time she was released from prison, her three children were grown up.
While the Hall case highlighted the failures of this type of regulation, these rules still haven many advocates.
Judge Thad Balkman, who is not involved in the Hogue matter, but has handled similar cases, they say that he has “nothing to criticize the law of lacks protection”.
“It is one of the traditions, both cultural and legal our country, that parents have an obligation to protect our children”, he told the BBC.
“The laws on the lack of protection is an extension of that duty of natural law that parents have towards their children.”
Last year he sentenced a woman to 10 years in prison for not reporting that her daughter was sexually abused by her boyfriend and for allowing abuse for years.
That is a case, he points out, that stayed in his head and that serves to reiterate the importance of making both parents responsible for what happens.
However, she accepts that domestic violence can impact people in different ways, but argues that the law, as proposed, is designed to take all of these things into account.
“I think there is enough discretion built into the law that gives judges the range they need to that the sentence adjusts to the crime”, he points out.
Recurring violence
During the trial, the prosecution argued that Hogue does not deserve the sympathy of abuse victims, like Hall, who are left with her partner out of fear.
They objected to the defense calling an expert on domestic violence to the stand and the judge agreed with the prosecution.
“I want to be 100% Clear. Rebecca Hogue is not a domestic violence victim of Christopher Trent, who killed that baby,” District Attorney Greg Mashburn told local news station KFOR.
“She is not he was afraid. I wasn’t worried about what he would do physically,” she added.
Mashburn refused to speak to the BBC about this story.
But Stacey Wright, an advocate against domestic violence on the group’s board Reproductive Justice Advocacy, says Trent’s repeated lies about Ryder’s injuries were “gaslighting,” a form of psychological abuse.
“That’s the thing about abuse, it messes with your ability to trust your gut and your intuition“, says Wright.
Hogue had a long history of violent relationships, including with Ryder’s father.
This had already been gone then and she thinks that if she had had better judgement, she would have left Trent.
“I wish he would have hit me., because then I would have run away “, she confesses.
She and Trent met for a mobile app about six months before Ryder’s death, and she was initially cautious and asked him to go to a party where all his friends were so they could meet him and give him their opinion.
“I wanted him to help me, because I was a single woman with a son”, she says.
She remembers taking him to the party, where he drank water all night. When he dropped her off at home that night, he introduced her to his son.
Remember Trent reached down and started to talk to Ryder, asking him questions and making jokes.
Soon they were living together. He said that he wanted to help her raise him, he wanted to start a family and adopt Ryder as her son. He even got her names tattooed on her chest.
“ I thought I loved my son so much “, she says. “Maybe we moved too fast.”
Looking back, Hogue wonders if Trent was “bombing” her. with love”, a technique that domestic violence experts say abusers use at the beginning of a relationship to shower their victims with affection, building trust and dependency.
For their part, Pezzel says that physical violence is not the only form of abuse, and that it is quite common for women who have left physically violent relationships to become targets of coercive psychological abuse by future women. partners.
“It is often assumed that victims choose their partners, but it is well known that it is their partners who strategically choose their partners. the most vulnerable victims,” he says.
Hogue told the BBC that he feels deep remorse for the death of his son and for not seeing Trent as he was.
Now, she is the one who pays for her boyfriend’s crimes.
Hogue points out that she obviously doesn’t want to stay in prison, but more than that, she wants people to know that she is not to blame for her son’s murder.
“God knows. And Ryder,” she concludes.
Now you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download our app and activate them so you don’t miss our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
123229681