Good Housekeeping & Smithsonian Articles Worth Reading

The imprisonment of people for crimes against children that they did not commit, or crimes that never even took place, is not confined to our area, nor is it a dead issue. In this month’s issue (Feb. 2006) of Good Housekeeping, there is an article on Margaret Mignano, falsely imprisoned for the murder of her disabled daughter.

Here is an excerpt from the article, “She Was Our Baby,” by Amy Engler.

“Margaret cried as she was paraded past the reporters. Shackled, she sat in the waiting area all day with her head down, trying to make the nightmare go away. She could hear [Investigator] Warren boasting to other police officers that he had “bagged the big one.”

Around midnight, guards led her to a tiny cell with a metal shelf for a bed, a sink, and a camera trained on the toilet. Margaret wondered how long it would take before everyone realized what a huge mistake had been made--that rather than kill Ashley, she’d done everything in her power to keep her alive. She knew she hadn’t given her daughter an overdose--Margaret was compulsive about checking and rechecking the pills she set out in little paper cups for each hour of the day. But who would take her word over the results of a laboratory test?”
Copyright 2006 Good Housekeeping.

Good Housekeeping has featured similar articles in other recent issues.


This month’s issue (Feb. 2006) of Smithsonian features an Amish family who had all of their children removed by Child Protective Services, supposedly because the parents abused them. Social workers and prosecutors, completely ignorant of Amish culture, placed all of these children with non-Amish families. It took real experts--a doctor who specializes in diseases specific to the close knit Amish and a sociologist who has spent a lifetime studying the Amish--to show that the children were not abused but suffered from a rare medical condition.