The Massachusetts Appeals Court said today a jury was correct in convicting unlicensed daycare operator Ann Power of Reading of involuntary manslaughter for the death of a three-month-old in her home in 2003.
The court noted that testimony showed Power repeatedly ignored state warnings to stop taking in children and that even if she had been licensed, she was simply caring for far too many children on the day little Mackenzie Corrigan was shaken to death.
The state actually charged Power with first-degree murder, alleging she had shaken the baby. Power's attorneys argued it was one of the other children in her care that day that shook the baby's child seat hard enough to kill her - on the day in question, she was caring for 14 children, from two months to 6 years. The jury in her case was given four possible options, from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.
In their decision, the appeals-court judges basically said that by rejecting the more serious charges, the jury was free to still find Power, who had been cited several times for running an illegal daycare facility in her home over 10 years, guilty for the baby's death:
While regulation limited a licensed facility to six children, and not more than three of them under two years of age, the defendant's unlicensed facility maintained twelve to fourteen children, of whom four were infants under one year of age and two more were under two years of age on the day of the victim's injury. The excessive number of infants particularly heightened the risk of a mishap by reason of their general helplessness and their particular vulnerability to head trauma. The evidence showed that the defendant could not simultaneously monitor all the children and that older children could mingle with the infants. The jury could find that the overextended and undersupervised operation of the defendant's home day care center had reached a degree of wanton or reckless creation of a high likelihood of substantial harm to the children, especially the infants.
Following her 2006 conviction, Power was sentenced to three to five years at MCI-Framingham.
Complete ruling.
