This is Our Future
The Handmaiden’s Tale, without the charm:
In early 2018, a 29-year-old Central Valley woman became the first person in decades to be jailed in California for the death of her stillborn infant.
In late 2019, it happened again. Another pregnant woman who struggled with addiction delivered a stillborn baby who tested positive for methamphetamine at Adventist Health hospital in the Kings County seat of Hanford. She was also flagged by doctors, investigated by local law enforcement and charged with murder by District Attorney Keith Fagundes.
The cases sparked national backlash from civil rights groups, which successfully fought to overturn the convictions. But now, as Gov. Gavin Newsom positions California as a reproductive rights sanctuary ahead of the Supreme Court’s anticipated reversal of Roe v. Wade, the cases are once again dividing residents in a bitter district attorney’s race in this corner of California’s heartland.
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“Those two cases, they’re a symptom of the disease,” said Sarah Hacker, a Hanford lawyer challenging Fagundes. “And the disease that has infected our criminal justice system here in Kings County is preferential treatment.”
For the incumbent Fagundes, it’s “not an abortion discussion,” but a matter of two drug cases that spiraled into a reproductive rights lightning rod — a sequence of events that he said he did not plan for, but which he has embraced.
“You know,” he said, “somebody’s gotta be a voice for that fetus.”
You have shown yourself to be the worst possible person to do this, because you are scaring pregnant women away from proper medical care.
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“I haven’t been to San Francisco in years, because the last time I was there it was disgusting,” Fagundes said. “And I don’t want my community to be like San Francisco.”
And a gay bashing son of a bitch as well.
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Becker’s attorney, Samantha Lee of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said the isolated California cases are part of a national trend toward criminalizing pregnant people. The advocacy group identified more than 1,330 prosecutions nationwide from 2006 to 2020, more than triple the 413 cases prosecuted from 1973 to 2005.
The goal here is not protection of anyone. It’s about control of women by people who hate women.
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But at two dueling pickup trucks blanketed in Hacker and Fagundes campaign signs parked outside the busy Superior Dairy ice cream shop in downtown Hanford, it’s not the stillbirth cases that she’s stressing to voters. Instead, a folder taped to the window of the truck offered printed copies of a lawsuit filed last year by former Kings County District Attorney Chief Investigator Robert Waggle.
The lawsuit, which was filed against the county in September, alleged that Fagundes harassed and retaliated against Waggle, including claims that Fagundes touched Waggle “in a sexual manner” and kept “blackmail folders” on employees. The complaint is one of several that Fagundes has attempted to fight off in recent months, including two county-approved settlements with other former employees, one who accused the district attorney of “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”
And this asshole is a self-hating closet case.
It’s only a matter of time before he is found suffocated (self-inflicted) in a closet in a wet suit, with a rubber hood, rubber gloves, slippers, tied up like a Thanksgiving turkey with a dildo up his ass. (Link)
