About a year ago, I wrote about the awful case of Herbert and Catherine Schaible, members of a Pentecostal church that believes in faith healing, who were charged with the death of their 8-month old child whose life could have been saved if they had sought medical treatment.
What was shocking was that in 2011 they had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of yet another child, a 2-year-old, from pneumonia that had again not been treated. For that they received a 10-year probation sentence and were ordered to seek medical treatment if another child got sick. Clearly they did not do that. They have seven other surviving children.
Yesterday a judge sentenced them to prison for 3½ to seven years. The judge emphatically rejected the idea that the children died because it was ‘their time’, the same reasoning given by believers to explain Jamie Coots’s death.
Judge Benjamin Lerner rejected defense claims that their religious beliefs “clashed” with the 2011 court order to get annual checkups and call a doctor if a child became ill. The order came after a jury convicted them of involuntary manslaughter in Kent’s death, and they were sentenced to 10 years of probation.
“April of 2013 wasn’t Brandon’s time to die,” Lerner said, noting the violence committed throughout human history in the name of religion. “You’ve killed two of your children. … Not God. Not your church. Not religious devotion. You.”
Apparently about a dozen children a year die because of beliefs that prayer will heal them. It is senseless and tragic.