Ohio mom gets life term in baby’s microwave death

Asso­ci­ated Press

DAYTON — An Ohio woman con­victed of killing her month-old baby daugh­ter in a microwave oven was spared the death penalty and sen­tenced Fri­day to life in prison with­out parole.

Mont­gomery County Com­mon Pleas Judge Mary Wise­man sen­tenced China Arnold, 31, of Day­ton, who psy­chol­o­gists tes­ti­fied showed no signs of seri­ous men­tal ill­ness. Arnold declined to make a state­ment dur­ing her sentencing.

Arnold was con­victed last week of aggra­vated mur­der by the same jury that rec­om­mended her pun­ish­ment. Jurors delib­er­ated about six hours Thurs­day and Friday.

Pros­e­cu­tors say Arnold inten­tion­ally put 28-day-old Paris Tal­ley in a microwave and turned it on after a fight with her boyfriend. The cou­ple had argued over whether the boyfriend was the infant’s bio­log­i­cal father.

Defense attor­ney Jon Paul Rion argued that the evi­dence pointed as much to the boyfriend as it did to the child’s mother, who Rion said was drunk at the time.

After Friday’s hear­ing, Rion told the Day­ton Daily News he would appeal. He did not imme­di­ately return a mes­sage left at his office by The Asso­ci­ated Press.

The prosecutor’s office had no imme­di­ate comment.

Med­ical experts tes­ti­fied that the baby died quickly after her tem­per­a­ture reached between 107 to 108 degrees Fahren­heit. They said she prob­a­bly was in the microwave for more than two minutes.

“She died because she was over­heated,” said Dr. Mar­cella Fierro, retired chief med­ical exam­iner for Vir­ginia. “She was cooked.”

It was Arnold’s third trial in her daughter’s 2005 death. Her first trial ended in a mis­trial when new wit­nesses sur­faced just before clos­ing argu­ments. Her sec­ond trial ended in a guilty ver­dict and a life sen­tence. But an appeals court over­turned the con­vic­tion when it found pros­e­cu­to­r­ial mis­con­duct and said the trial judge erred in not allow­ing a rel­e­vant wit­ness to testify.

The sen­tenc­ing phase was delayed ear­lier this week to allow time for a men­tal exam of Arnold. Two psy­chol­o­gists tes­ti­fied Thurs­day that Arnold was of aver­age intel­li­gence and showed no signs of seri­ous men­tal illness.

Dr. Jef­frey Small­don said Arnold suf­fered from a “low-grade chronic depres­sive con­di­tion” as well as alco­hol and drug abuse. He said he found noth­ing “that would have jus­ti­fied the death of this child.”

In argu­ing for the death sen­tence, Assis­tant Mont­gomery County Pros­e­cu­tor Dan Brandt told the jury there were no fac­tors that mit­i­gate the “pur­pose­ful mur­der of baby Paris in that microwave.”

Defense attor­ney Kevin Lennen said that death or life in prison would be a tough penalty, but death should go only to the worst offend­ers. He pointed to evi­dence that Arnold was drunk at the time of the baby’s death.

Posted by AP News on May 20 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.