Mothers And Killers

By Sally B. Donnelly/Washington

The Washington courtroom was crowded and tense as the prosecutor bored in on Latrena Pixley, a young mother who sat emotionless on the witness stand. "You carried your first child for nine months, held him in your arms and then gave him away. You carried your second child for nine months, held him in your arms, and you haven't seen him for six years. You carried your third child for nine months, held her in your arms and then killed her. Right?" Pixley looked up blankly, paused and answered, "Yes."

Despite hearing that damning litany, District of Columbia superior court Judge George Mitchell last month ordered that Pixley be moved from a detention center--where she was serving time for killing her daughter and committing credit-card fraud--to a facility that allows children, so that she could take custody of her fourth child, Cornilous, 2. In an earlier, related action, Montgomery County (Md.) circuit court Judge Michael Mason had ruled that Pixley was free of the postpartum depression that had caused her to kill her daughter, and that it was in Cornilous' "best interest" that he be returned to his biological mother.

Last Thursday a Maryland appeals court upheld that ruling. Within a few weeks, Cornilous could be taken from the heartbroken Maryland woman with whom he has spent almost all of his short life and who wants to adopt him. The case has drawn national attention and fueled a bitter debate over the courts' strong bias in favor of "family preservation." Complains Bill Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption: "It is not in Cornilous' best interest to be part of a social experiment to observe what might happen if Latrena Pixley is given one more chance."

What's particularly troubling about the Pixley case is that the judges involved are not rogue thinkers. Courts across the country routinely return children to their biological parents despite prior neglect and abuse. In April a judge in New York ruled to reunite a five-year-old boy with his mother, who had killed her other son in 1994. In Figsboro, Va., a woman was allowed to retain custody of her eight-month-old daughter despite being charged with fracturing the infant's skull; the baby was stabbed to death on Mother's Day, and the mother has now been charged with murder.

But the pendulum may be swinging. Last year Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which requires courts and government agencies to consider prior neglect, abuse and murder in reunification cases. States face the loss of federal child-welfare funds if they don't come into line with the act. So far, only a handful of states have amended their laws to comply. One of those is Maryland, where a group of legislators, outraged by the Pixley case, pushed a bill through this spring.

The new federal law, however, covers only those children who are already in a state's foster-care system when a biological parent seeks custody. Cornilous missed out on qualifying because his mother, while on probation for the murder of her daughter, allowed Laura Blankman, a woman she had befriended at the public defender's office, to take custody of her son informally. Blankman, 28, now a police officer, has cared for and supported Cornilous since he was three months old. Last fall she decided to adopt him. Pixley, by then in a part-time detention facility, resisted--even though she had been unable to hold down a steady job, and had contributed a grand total of $200 to her son's care. In a case burdened by race--Pixley is black, Blankman white--the courts once again favored the biological mother and denied the adoption.

By week's end Blankman had not decided whether to appeal to Maryland's highest court to let her keep Cornilous. But even if the court agrees to hear her case, the boy could be returned to his biological mother by Sept. 1. Already, Cornilous has begun overnight visits to Pixley at her halfway house. In the meantime, a distraught Blankman says she lives each day with the boy as if it were their last one together.