Death of Malnourished Girl, Marchella Pierce, Ruled Homicide

A 4-year-old Brooklyn girl who weighed 18 pounds when she was found dead last month had toxic levels of antihistamines in her system, the city’s chief medical examiner’s office said on Friday in ruling the death a homicide.

The office said the girl, Marchella Pierce, died of “child abuse syndrome with acute drug poisoning, blunt impact injuries, malnutrition and dehydration,” according to a statement issued by the office.

The drugs found in her body were diphenhydramine and desloratadine, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office. Each drug is marketed under many names, including Benadryl for diphenhydramine and Clarinex for desloratadine. The term child abuse syndrome means that the abuse occurred over a period of time and was not a one-time occurrence, Ms. Borakove said.

Investigators have been awaiting the findings since the police found the girl dead in her mother’s apartment on Sept. 2. The mother, Carlotta Brett-Pierce, is facing charges that include second-degree assault, endangering the welfare of a child, unlawful imprisonment and reckless endangerment. Those charges are likely to be elevated sharply based on the medical examiner’s findings.

“The case is under investigation and additional charges are possible,” said Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

In a criminal complaint filed last month, prosecutors outlined a litany of abuse that they said the girl suffered in her final days at the hands of her mother. The girl, who had been plagued by severe health problems since her birth on April 30, 2006, and spent most of her life hospitalized, had only returned to the family full time in February.

Ms. Brett-Pierce repeatedly struck the girl with a belt and a video box at their home on Madison Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the complaint said, citing a witness account. The mother lashed the girl to a bed with twine and forced her “to take blue sleeping pills,” the complaint added.

A Brooklyn grand jury is also looking into actions of the Administration for Children’s Services, which had monitored the girl’s family before she died, and other agencies that were involved in the girl’s care.

In testimony to the City Council this month, the children’s services commissioner, John B. Mattingly, acknowledged that the case revealed systemic problems in the agency that persisted even after reforms were instituted following the 2006 beating death of a 7-year-old girl, Nixzmary Brown.

In Marchella’s case, a caseworker and a supervisor in the Brooklyn field office of the children’s services agency appeared not to have visited the girl or her family for months, the agency acknowledged, despite indications that she was at risk. The last recorded contact, the agency said, was on March 2.

In a statement released on Friday, the agency said, “Since learning of her death and launching an investigation we have already begun addressing practice concerns within the child welfare system that were identified as a result of this case.”

Death Sentence of Convicted Sorcerer Rejected in Saudi Arabia

We welcome the news this week that the Supreme Court of Saudi Arabia decided not to ratify the death sentence of a Lebanese man accused of “sorcery”.

The court decided that the death sentence for ‘Ali Hussain Sibat was inappropriate because there was no proof that others were harmed as a result of his actions. ‘Ali will now be retried in a lower court to consider commutation of his death sentence and his release and deportation to Lebanon.

The “sorcery” charges against ‘Ali Hussain Sibat relate to his former role as a presenter on the Lebanese satellite TV station Sheherazade, in which he gave advice and predictions about the future.

When ‘Ali visited Saudi Arabia in May 2008, the religious police arrested him and told him to write down what he did for a living, misleading him into believing that if he did so he would be allowed to go home after a few weeks. This document was presented in court as his “confession” and used by the court to convict him. They jailed him for more than a year before sentencing him to death in November 2009.

In January 2010, the Court of Appeal in Makkah accepted an appeal against his death sentence on the grounds that all the allegations against him had to be verified, and that if he was found to have committed the crime he should be given the opportunity to repent.

Despite this, on March 10 a court in Madina upheld his death sentence after the judges said he deserved to be sentenced to death because he had practiced “sorcery” publicly for several years before millions of viewers. His actions, they said, made him an “infidel” — a word that apparently carries legal weight in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Court of Appeal in Makkah subsequently upheld the death sentence in April 2010 and referred the case to the Supreme Court, who subsequently ordered that the case be retried in the original lower court in Madina to consider commutation of his death sentence and his release and deportation to Lebanon.

Human Rights Now – Amnesty International USA Blog