‘Only in the Central Valley.’ Women charged with murder in connection to pregnancy loss
Attorneys question if a failure by local governments in the Central Valley to adequately invest in public health has led to what they describe as a region ill-equipped to support pregnant women and people with substance abuse.
The lawyers who spoke to The Fresno Bee raised those questions as part of the ongoing legal battle in two Kings County murder cases involving stillbirths. Both women used drugs during their pregnancies.
The Bee recently reviewed dozens of court documents related to the cases of Chelsea Becker and Adora Perez.
Those records show Perez was denied the lesser sentence of probation because the judge said he believed she could still get pregnant and use drugs.
Becker, who still faces murder charges, was kept on pretrial detention for 16 months for the same reasons — to prevent her from getting “pregnant again,” one of her attorneys, Dan Arshack, maintains.
Kings County is taking a punitive approach “to address what are essentially public health failings — poverty, environmental stresses that impact both pregnancy and drug use in the Central Valley,” said Jennifer Chou, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.
“I think it’s one of those things where you look at a story like this, and you kind of say, ‘Only in the Central Valley,’” she said. “The Central Valley is so under-resourced in terms of how we support pregnant people, and so under-resourced in how we support people with substance use disorder.”
On March 9, Becker was released on no bail from the Kings County jail, on condition she participate in a residential drug treatment program. She had been in custody on a $2 million bail, which was initially set at $5 million but reduced in February 2020.
Becker’s attorneys, which include representation from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, on March 23 filed a motion asking the Kings County Superior Court to dismiss murder charges against Becker. They describe the prosecution as “unlawful,” according to the motion.
Becker’s case and the Perez case that ended in a voluntary manslaughter plea in 2018 were both before Kings County Superior Court Judge Robert S. Burns. A court assistant in early March said Judge Burns isn’t allowed to discuss pending cases or issues that might come before him. The Bee wasn’t able to reach Becker or Perez.
‘Civilized world’ sees drug addiction as a medical issue, attorney says
Attorneys representing Becker argue the California murder law doesn’t apply to women who have a pregnancy loss. They say the Kings County Superior Court doesn’t have the authority to judicially expand a law to prosecute a person of a crime that’s outside the scope of the law.
Becker was charged with murder after her son, Zachariah Joseph Campos, died in her womb on Sept. 10, 2019. Becker, 25 at the time, later admitted she had used methamphetamine during her pregnancy as she had during previous pregnancies.
“Those intersections of poverty and racism, all affect the ways in which people are or aren’t able to access treatment and care for either pregnancy or substance abuse disorder,” Chou told The Bee.
But Kings County, Arshack said, doesn’t view drug addiction as a medical issue — a substance abuse disorder — like the rest of the “civilized world” knows it as.
“They live in a world, in very conservative Kings County, where it’s viewed as a failure of personal morality for a person to be addicted to drugs,” he said. “They view it as a failure of personal choice ... and they tend to hold women criminally liable for what they say is a choice.”
In a May 2020 response by Kings County prosecutors to a request by Becker’s attorneys for the court to determine that murder charges could not be brought against a woman for a pregnancy loss, prosecutors cited two research studies.
“It is well documented within the realm of public knowledge that a mother’s methamphetamine use can cause serious harm or death to a viable unborn child,” prosecutors wrote, citing the studies.
The researchers behind the studies quickly pushed back against the prosecutors’ conclusion by filing affidavits with the court. At least one of them asked prosecutors to file a correction and retract their reliance on their research to support a position that is “factually wrong,” records show.
Barry Marshall Lester is a child and development psychologist, as well as a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Lester says he has reviewed the document filed by Kings County prosecutors in Becker’s case, according to a July 1, 2020 affidavit.
Lester was the senior author in both of the studies cited by prosecutors.
“The work that was presented in both of those papers does not, in any way, stand for the proposition put forth by the prosecutor,” his affidavit reads. “The work cited does not suggest that prenatal methamphetamine use ‘can cause serious harm or death to a viable unborn child.’”
Lester, who is also the founding director of the Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Brown Medical School and Women and Infants Hospital, says there is no clear scientific link between prenatal methamphetamine exposure and serious harm or death in an unborn child, according to his affidavit.
Philip Esbenshade, executive assistant district attorney, recently told The Bee the prosecutor who drafted the documents, Assistant District Attorney Louis Torch, used the studies as an example, rather than using the studies as the source of a quotation.
This kind of legal writing, Esbenshade said, provides “information to articles or cases that indirectly support the text.”
“It was never stated that these two articles state methamphetamine use causes death, although it clearly does based on the circumstances” of Becker’s case, he told The Bee in early March.
Similar cases have been dismissed, but Kings County finds murder charges to legally stand
In a long legal battle that has stretched across the Kings County Superior Court, the California Court of Appeal and the state’s Supreme Court, Becker spent 16 months in pretrial detention at the Kings County jail.
In December, the Supreme Court postponed addressing whether women in California can be charged with murder for their own pregnancy loss, according to Arshack, one of Becker’s attorneys. At the same time, the Supreme Court also ruled there should be a hearing on whether Becker was entitled to have a new bail hearing as a result of a change in the bail law that took place in August.
“Judges are now required to make a bail determination based on the financial resources of the defendant and not just on the basis of a county bail schedule,” Arshack said.
On March 9, Becker had a new hearing and was released on no bail.
“Chelsea is finally receiving the help and support that she has needed,” Arshack said. ”We look forward to her entire case being dismissed.”
The legal question over what constitutes murder goes back 50 years. California murder law changed in 1970 to include “willful assault on a pregnant woman resulting in the death of her fetus,” according to the amendment’s primary author, longtime Republican legislator W. Craig Biddle.
“No legislator ever suggested that this legislation, as it was finally adopted, could be used to make punishable as murder conduct by a pregnant woman that resulted in the death of her fetus,” Biddle further declared in a 1992 court filing related to a case in San Benito County.
Arshack said there have been instances where prosecutors have attempted to make the murder law applicable to similar situations, but those cases have been dismissed.
Furthermore, Arshack says Becker had three different infections at the time of the birth, each of which are known to cause stillbirths.
The Kings County Coroner’s Office report, however, says the cause of death for Zachariah Joseph Campos was intrauterine fetal demise due to “acute methamphetamine toxicity.”
In November, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed a brief in support of Becker, arguing she shouldn’t be charged with murder in connection to her son’s stillbirth death.
However, Kings County Judge Burns and a visiting judge have found murder charges against Becker to legally stand, Esbenshade said. The out-of-county judge in mid-December, during Becker’s preliminary hearing, heard arguments about the state’s murder law not criminalizing the behavior of a woman for the outcome of her pregnancy.
“That judge found sufficient evidence to hold Ms. Becker to answer for the murder charge based on the specific facts of Ms. Becker’s case,” Esbenshade said.
Becker, he said, has been sober for the longest period of time in her life when she was in custody.
“We have hope in her rehabilitation and her ability to stop choosing drugs over her children,” Esbenshade told The Bee in early March.
Judge denies probation to Perez because she will get pregnant, use drugs
Perez, whose case is identical to that of Becker, was represented by a public defender. She eventually entered a no-contest plea to voluntary manslaughter. Her plea was part of a deal where one count of murder was dismissed, according to records.
Soon after, with private representation, Perez filed a motion to withdraw her plea.
On June 15, 2018, Perez was sentenced to the “upper term” of 11 years in prison. Judge Burns denied the lesser possible sentence for probation, saying, “It is likely that at the age of 30 the defendant will continue to become pregnant and use controlled substances during that pregnancy on a regular basis.”
“The defendant indicates a willingness to comply with probation terms, and admits using drugs since she was approximately 16 years old,” Judge Burns said, according to transcripts. “However, her admitted drug usage through multiple pregnancies indicates a complete inability to do so.”
Arshack said as part of Perez’s “open plea,” the sentence was up to the judge, and he had indicated he could sentence her anywhere from probation to 11 years.
“Of course she had no reason to believe that she would get a long sentence,” Arshack said.
Perez had gone into labor on Dec. 31, 2017, but the baby was born with no signs of life. Perez had a placenta abruption, which is common in women who use methamphetamine, according to records.
The primary cause of death was asphyxiation from the placenta detachment and a toxic level of methamphetamine, according to documents.
“It is deeply troubling to me, in this day and age, given what we know about how to effectively address substance use disorder in pregnant women that a woman with a substance use disorder should be charged with murder based on her alleged use of methamphetamine while pregnant,” Lester says in his affidavit.
This story was originally published March 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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