Now is the time for your tears

I got this story from local station FOX 45, as reported by Joy Lepola.

A week after being indicted on charges of second degree murder, manslaughter, first degree child abuse, neglect of a minor and reckless endangerment, Paula Shipley has been released from the Carroll County Detention Center. Shipley's 4 year old daughter died from an overdose in March. An autopsy showed the child had a lethal dose of narcotics in her system. Today, Judge Barry Hughes in Carroll County granted Shipley a bail of $75,000. Shipley is being represented by attorney Haven Shoemaker, who is also a County Commissioner.

I keep thinking about this...this woman is 46 years of age, and was just indicted last week in the death of her little 4-year-old daughter, who passed away on March 21 of a lethal dose of various narcotics.  And the judge lets her out on bail of 75 Gs.  

And her attorney, the honorable Haven Shoemaker, is also a county commissioner out there in Carroll County.

You might remember the William Zantzinger case from 1963.  Zantzinger was a rich, spoiled brat, a member of the landed gentry, a gentleman tobacco farmer from Charles County who found himself here in the big town for a drunken night at the Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel.  A boorish ass of a "human," he chose to hurl racial slurs at a barmaid named Hattie Carroll, and smack her around with one of those stupid bamboo canes that they used to hand out at state fairs and carnivals, after he assaulted employees at a downtown restaurant.  None of his rich-guy friends thought to tell this 22-year dipstick that he should not go around hitting people with his cane.  And then Ms Carroll didn't bring him his drinks fast enough, and he smacked her again around the head and shoulders, and she left the room, his racial slurs fouling the air, and collapsed.  She died at Mercy Hospital, aged 51 years.  Cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage.

Zantzinger was taken into custody, lawyered up, and got six months.

Bob Dylan came to Baltimore to gather facts about this travesty in the song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."  Click on that link and listen to the song, please, and see if we have come very far in fifty years.  I know, they only let this mother out on pre-trial bail, and the judge might yet give her a sentence wholly in keeping with the enormity of the crime of which she stands accused. But this just reminds me of the age-old tradition of "who-knows-whom justice" that has prevailed in Maryland since the first settlers, and it's about time it stopped.