Adding another dimension of strangeness to a missing-woman case that has become a television sensation in the United States, California police yesterday charged Scott Peterson with two counts of first-degree murder, one for killing his wife, Laci Peterson, and one for killing the fetus she carried.
A controversial 1970 California law allows murder charges to apply to viable fetuses, as long as they are not killed in an abortion or by the mother. At least 23 of the 50 U.S. states have such laws, which have survived appeals.
The charge has enraged women's-rights groups, whose members argue that applying the concept of murder to a fetus implies that it is a human being, contradicting U.S. Supreme Court rulings that permit abortions.
"If this is murder, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder," said Mavra Stark of the Morris County, Calif., chapter of the National Organization for Women. She said she is concerned that the case could lend rhetorical ammunition to anti-abortion groups.
Indeed, many Americans seem eager to humanize Ms. Peterson's fetus. At memorial sites, scores of signs and cards have been left for "baby Conner," the name that Mr. Peterson said he and his wife would have given the child had it been born.
Mr. Peterson's wife was eight months pregnant when she disappeared shortly before Christmas. Her remains and those of a fetus were found in San Francisco Bay last week, and Mr. Peterson was arrested near the Mexican border carrying $10,000 (U.S.) in cash and with his hair dyed lighter.
Yesterday he pleaded not guilty to both charges.
In Canada, murder charges cannot be laid in connection with the death of a fetus because a fetus is not a person in law, constitutional lawyer Morris Manning said yesterday.
"There could potentially be a civil suit against a third party for injuries to a fetus, but there can be no criminal charge," Mr. Manning said in an interview. "We consider charges involving the killing of the mother to be sufficient."
California prosecutors said they applied the rarely used fetus-murder law to Mr. Peterson so that he would face two murder charges. In California, people charged with multiple murders must be sentenced either to death or to life in prison with no chance of parole.
"It's hard for me to realistically believe it is anything but a death-penalty case at this time," Modesto County prosecutor James Brazelton said yesterday.
Some lawyers also suggested that prosecutors are using the fetus-murder law because it is likely to draw sympathy from jurors. Police are said to be short of solid evidence linking Mr. Peterson to the killing, so such tactics could prove important.
"There's nothing like a dead baby in a case to change the whole tenor of a prosecution," said Nanci Clarence, a criminal-defence lawyer in San Francisco. Without a murder charge against the fetus, the jury might not otherwise learn of Ms. Peterson's pregnancy.
The case has attracted a surprising degree of media attention in the United States. For the past week, it has driven the Iraq war off TV screens there and covered the front pages of newspapers.
Though grisly in its details, it is not exceptional. A few months before Ms. Peterson's case became front-page news, another San Francisco woman, Evelyn Hernandez, disappeared in the same region. She too was pregnant; her body too was found floating in San Francisco Bay, and the father is a suspect in the case.
The Hernandez case captured almost no media attention, failing to make the front page even in San Francisco.
Police say they are baffled at the discrepancy between the media attention to the Peterson case and that given the dozens of similar killings every year.
"It's embarrassing," Holly Pera, a San Francisco police inspector, said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday about the Hernandez case. "We've pushed and asked for and received as much as we possibly could. But we don't make the decision about what gets covered and what doesn't."
With a report from Kirk Makin
