The Child Protection eNewsletter

Andrea Yates retrial opens…
Texas mother Andrea Yates  vol3_iss2  will stand trial again for the drowning deaths of her children.  http://www.kbtv4.tv  A prosecutor told a Harris County jury Monday that Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub because she thought she was a bad mother and wanted to be punished.  http://www.kwtx.com  Kaylynn Williford's statement opened Yates' retrial on murder charges in the deaths of three of those five children.  Andrea Yates sobbed as prosecutors played a crime-scene videotape in court Tuesday showing her 7-year-old son floating dead in a bathtub and the bodies of her four younger children laid out on a bed.  http://abcnews.go.com  The video also showed toys in the yard and a baby swing hanging from a tree outside the suburban home on June 20, 2001, the day Yates killed her five children.  She watched that part intently but looked down as the camera moved inside.  Her 2002 conviction was overturned last year because of erroneous testimony.  As in her first trial, Yates has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

In other news...  
Not wanting to lose illegal immigrant volunteers, the Los Angeles and Orange Roman Catholic dioceses have quietly backed away from a pledge to root out pedophiles by running fingerprint background checks on anyone who works with children.  http://www.latimes.com  The policies, revamped last year and recently uncovered by The Times, outraged victim advocates who said the dioceses are putting concern for illegal immigrants before the protection of children.

The Roman Catholic bishop of Santa Rosa failed to immediately report an admission of child abuse by a priest who has since left the country, authorities said Thursday.  http://www.montereyherald.com  The Rev. Xavier Ochoa was suspended April 28 after admitting an incident of sexual abuse with a 12-year-old boy.  Bishop Daniel Walsh didn't notify law enforcement until three days later, giving Ochoa time to flee to Mexico, according to church and law enforcement officials.

A new law requiring Virginia's colleges to hand over prospective students' personal information to police for cross-checking against sex offender lists is coming under fire from privacy advocates and education leaders.  http://www.dailypress.com  Proponents say the law will help protect students from sex offenders and state police are confident the personal information will be secure. But critics are raising concerns about privacy rights and risks that the data could be misused or stolen.

Three Orlando-area theme park workers were suspended on Monday after an online sex sting operation in Polk County.  http://www.wesh.com  Twenty-one people were arrested in all, including two Disney employees, hospitality host George Auld III and ride operator Jason Lee Honeycutt.  Universal CityWalk food-and-beverage employee Brian Stenstrup was also charged, WESH 2 News reported.

Sen. Charles Grassley, chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, wants the Internal Revenue Service to chase after pimps and sex traffickers with the same fervor it stalked gangster Al Capone for tax evasion.  http://www.foxnews.com  Grassley, R-Iowa, would hit pimps with fines and lengthy prison sentences for failing to file employment forms and withhold taxes for the women and girls under their command.  If passed, the provision will authorize at least $2 million toward the establishment of an office in the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation unit to prosecute unlawful sex workers for violations of tax laws.  http://www.cnn.com

Five leading online service providers will jointly build a database of child-pornography images and develop other tools to help network operators and law enforcement better prevent distribution of the images.  http://www.foxnews.com

As part of the marketing effort for its big summer movie, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," Walt Disney Co. last month held a contest on the popular social networking site MySpace.com.  http://online.wsj.com  To publicize the contest, Disney built its own "page" on MySpace and bought an ad on MySpace's front page.  But it steered clear of the profile pages created by MySpace's nearly 85 million users -- the popular but controversial part of the site where users post links to friends' pages, list their likes and dislikes and display photos, sometimes including scenes of underage drinking and sexually suggestive material.  vol4_iss27


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