Angelica Swartout told family her newborn baby was stillborn

[VXIII]

Now this is just my opinion but I don't think the girl was ever pregnant. I think she's just your basic garden-variety pathological liar who backed herself into a corner and had to find a way out. She talked about how her family was about babies. I'm thinking that that was her way back in and to get treated like a princess and she took it.

When it was show time, she couldn't produce a baby, so she came up with her story.

My sister was a pathological liar. She lied so much, she herself lost track of where the truth ended and the lies started. Believing your own lies goes a long way in the convincing, but it doesn't create a baby out of thin air.

I agree and just thank the gods she just faked a miscarriage and didnt go hunt down some poor full term pregnant woman, kill her and try to cut the baby out of her. If there was blood at her job bathroom they can test that to see what type of blood it was and DNA it, she could have just put menstrual blood or something all over. who knows but I think she was a faker too. We will soon find out because they can tell if you have had a baby in the past... science is wonderful these days, problem is they always have a doctor for the defence and one for prosecution who give 2 different stories. Makes it 50/50 chance on who is more believable...

[malq]

Speaking of double dicks, I just happen to have this photo of @malq laying around.

[IMG][SPOILER]http://i42.tinypic.com/jza58h.jpg[/SPOILER][/IMG]

.

That's it, I am posting your teats. That was supposed to be between us.

[Dakota Valkyrie]

A single holdout prevented a Lane County jury from reaching a unanimous verdict required to convict a Springfield woman of murdering a newborn child, one of the jurors said during an interview with The Register-Guard.

Eleven of the 12 jurors asked to decide whether Angelica Swartout fatally smothered a baby determined following a trial earlier this month that prosecutors proved the woman is guilty of murder, said the juror, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Evidence supporting an allegation that the 24-year-old Swartout killed her son “was overwhelming,” the juror said.

But one panelist apparently didn’t think so — although the juror who spoke with the newspaper said the lone holdout was unable to explain exactly why he felt Swartout should be acquitted.

“He couldn’t really come up with a good reason,” the juror said. “He basically said at the end, ‘I can’t convict anyone.’”

After it became clear the man would not be pressured into changing his mind, the jury informed Lane County Circuit Judge Suzanne Chanti that it could not reach a verdict following four full days of deliberations, according to the juror who agreed to be interviewed.

Chanti subsequently declared a mistrial and announced a second murder trial for Swartout would begin April 16.
[...]

A conviction would have required a unanimous vote of the 12-member panel, while an acquittal required 10 to find her not guilty.

The eight women and four men who comprised the jury were not identified by name in court.

Chanti told jurors after declaring the mistrial that they were free to talk to anyone about the case. A second juror contacted by the newspaper declined to discuss the panel’s deliberations.

The juror who did speak with the newspaper said the jury took an initial vote upon convening behind closed doors following the trial.

They voted anonymously, using blank slips of paper as ballots. The juror said he and one other person voted in favor of finding Swartout guilty, while “two or three others” cast votes of not guilty. The other seven or eight panelists indicated they had not yet come to a conclusion, the juror said.

The jury spent the rest of that afternoon and all of the next day — Friday, Feb. 3 — reviewing their notes, discussing the credibility of witness testimony and evaluating evidence offered by both sides, the juror said.

The evidence included a two-hour videotape on which the hotel clerk confessed to a Springfield police detective that she had suffocated her newborn son while at work on Oct. 18, 2010.

“We analyzed that confession pretty well,” the juror said.

Her defense attorneys have contended that Swartout falsely confessed at the suggestion of police, and that she faked a pregnancy and stillbirth to gain attention and support from her large adoptive family.

While the confession was a central part of the prosecution’s case, the juror who spoke with the newspaper said “it was the totality of” the evidence that led him to conclude that Swartout was guilty.

The juror said he believed the testimony of a coworker of Swartout’s who said she had found blood in an employee bathroom when she came to work the night of the alleged murder. Shirley Hogan said she asked Swartout about the blood, and the clerk said she’d had a miscarriage. Hogan, who said she’d seen no indication that Swartout was pregnant, also reported finding “fresh-looking blood” on sheets in a laundry bin.

Hogan “had nothing to gain from this thing,” the juror said in explaining why he accepted her testimony as true.

The juror said he generally found the prosecution’s witnesses — from a doctor who examined Swartout and testified that it was more likely than not that Swartout had delivered a baby, to family members who said they believed she was pregnant — to be more credible than those offered by defense attorneys. Doctors who testified for the defense said they suspected Swartout had not delivered a full-term baby, and several people close to the woman said she did not appear to be in advanced pregnancy at a summer 2010 baby shower in her honor.

The jury returned for further deliberations on Monday, Feb. 6. At some point that day, they took a second anonymous vote by paper, according to the juror who agreed to be interviewed.

The vote: 11-to-1 in favor of convicting Swartout of aggravated murder, the juror said.

After the holdout’s identity became known, the majority began questioning him about his point of view.

“We just wanted to know what was the deal,” the juror said.

The juror said that panelists who disagreed with the man “didn’t get too heated with him, but people were being pretty blunt because they were disappointed and upset about it.”

The juror said he and the others finally concluded — two days later, on Wednesday, Feb. 8 — that the man would not change his mind and join them in voting to convict Swartout.
[...]

Although he remains convinced Swartout is guilty, the juror who spoke with the newspaper said he understands how someone could have trouble convicting a person of a “horrific” murder.

“There is a psychological burden that comes along with it,” the juror said. “I don’t think anyone wants to say someone’s guilty (in a case such as Swartout’s), because I don’t think a good person wants to believe that someone is capable of doing that to a baby.”

http://www.registerguard.com/web/new...hanti.html.csp

[Dakota Valkyrie]

A judge on Friday postponed by two weeks the scheduled April 16 retrial of a Springfield woman accused of killing her alleged newborn child in October of 2010.

Lane County Circuit Judge Suzanne Chanti denied a motion by Angelica Swartout’s defense attorneys seeking a longer delay so they could prepare to raise new issues in defense of the 24-year-old hotel clerk.
[...]

“Our initial trial strategy didn’t work,” defense attorney Gordon Mallon had told Chanti during an initial hearing on Monday on the issue of a retrial postponement. “And so we are rebuilding our case. ... We’re not going to do the same thing.”

But the judge told him she would not delay the new trial for that reason.

“The fact that you got a mistrial out of that doesn’t mean that I have to extend the whole proceeding so you can say, ‘Oh, that didn’t work so now I’m going to do something different’ ” Chanti said. “You can certainly do something different, but I really think we need to get this case done.”

At a hearing on Friday, Chanti formally granted a two-week extension.
[...]


While hearing arguments on the motion Friday, Chanti took prosecutor Bob Lane’s suggestion that she push the retrial back to April 30 to accommodate the scheduling problems with witnesses and Oldenkamp’s other cases. The judge made the April 30 date contingent on the availability of the prosecution’s main medical witness, however.

Mallon indicated Friday that the defense team is preparing to challenge the validity and admissibility of evidence presented by that witness, Dr. Marcia Edwards, in Swartout’s first trial. The local obstetrician/*gynecologist testified that a pelvic exam she performed on Swartout at the Lane County Jail suggested that Swartout more likely than not had delivered a full-term or near full-term child.

The defense team presented testimony from two OB/GYNs who reached the opposite conclusion. Swartout’s lawyers are now “looking for a new medical expert to respond to some of these things,” Mallon said.

“Basically, we are looking for a higher authority,” he added.

Chanti also set a March 13 settlement conference — most likely with Lane County Circuit Judge Karsten Rasmussen — in hope that the two sides could resolve the case without the time and expense of a second trial.

http://www.registerguard.com/web/new...judge.html.csp

[Dakota Valkyrie]

Attorneys for Angelica Swartout argued Friday that jurors in her new murder trial should not hear a conversation with her sister videotaped at the Springfield Police Department shortly after her December 2010 confession to smothering a newborn son.

Swartout’s first murder trial ended in a mistrial Feb. 9, after jurors deadlocked without a verdict after four days of deliberation. A new trial is set to begin April 30.
[...]

Swartout’s videotaped statements to one of those sisters, Jewell Sward, was the subject of the motion argued Friday before Lane County Circuit Judge Suzanne Chanti. That taped conversation should be off limits to jurors because Swartout began it by repeatedly telling a police officer she did not wish to speak to Sward, defense attorney Evelyn Oldenkamp told the judge. Swartout’s protestations amounted to invoking her right to remain silent, because police sent Sward into the interview room to try to get incriminating information about the location of the alleged infant’s body, the defense lawyer said.

“When you say you don’t want to talk anymore ... that is a line citizens get to draw and law enforcement does not get to cross that line,” Oldenkamp said.

In a motion filed this week, she wrote that the same alleged violation of Swartout’s constitutional rights also should prevent jurors from hearing Swartout’s subsequent interview with Springfield Detective George Crolly, “wherein she concedes to his version of what happened to the alleged fetus.”

Lane County Deputy District Attorney Bob Lane asked Chanti to deny the motion and let the new jury consider both conversations as evidence.

He noted that, before Swartout’s first trial, Chanti twice denied defense motions to keep the conversations out of evidence based on other factors.

“They should have made (the new) argument then,” Lane said.

He charged that the defense chose not to do so for strategic reasons, since two of their psychology experts cited the videotaped interviews as buttressing their opinions that Swartout’s confession was coerced.

“Their last strategy didn’t work, so they need to try something different,” the prosecutor said. “Our position is, (the decision on admissibility) is over.”

Chanti said she would research the matter before ruling on the defense motion but appeared to agree with Lane’s point that Swartout’s attorneys knew but failed to raise objections during the first trial about Sward going in as an agent of police. The judge questioned Oldenkamp about whether Swartout was asking to end the interview or was simply too emotionally overwrought to want to see her sister.

The judge also said “there was nothing sneaky about what they were doing ... Detective (Dave) Lewis told them they were being videotaped.”
[...]

Though he had not filed a motion requesting that the media be excluded during jury selection, Mallon also said Friday that he would send Chanti a court case establishing that precedent.

http://www.registerguard.com/web/new...urors.html.csp

[Dakota Valkyrie]

New trial is on:

Both prosecution and defense attorneys will call new witnesses in the second trial of a Eugene woman charged with killing a newborn baby, they said in opening statements.
[...]

During opening statements Friday, Lane County Deputy District Attorney Bob Lane mirrored his previous presentation of the case. He said Swartout's family and friends watched her belly "getting bigger" and that a sister would testify to seeing and feeling a baby kick beneath the bare skin of Swartout's belly three days before the murder.

He said the state would prove Swartout bore and suffocated the newborn and discarded his body in a hotel trash bin while she worked alone on the swing shift Oct. 18, 2010. Swartout's sister, Lane said, would testify that Swartout came home from work that night no longer appearing pregnant and "smelling like afterbirth."

A second obstetrician-gynecologist, he said, would join a physician from the first trial in testifying that a jailhouse exam showed changes in Swartout's body consistent with giving birth.

He also said jurors watch her videotaped confession recorded Dec. 8, 2010.

"You don't have to take my word for it," he concluded. "You'll hear it out of her own mouth."

Defense attorney Evelyn Oldenkamp told jurors a friend would testify of being told that Swartout had an abortion.
[...]

Oldenkamp also will present evidence, she said, that Swartout's boss did not leave the hotel office for more than two hours after Swartout began her 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift and that company records will show she was active on the hotel's computer, checking guests in and out for much of her shift.

"Ladies and gentlemen, time is important when this 'event,' this preplotted, horrendous crime is alleged to have occurred," Oldenkamp said. "When the time comes to deliberate, use your common sense. ... Was there time?"

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-no...e_woman_i.html

[Obsolete]

Swartout's sister, Lane said, would testify that Swartout came home from work that night no longer appearing pregnant and "smelling like afterbirth."

huh?

[penelopejo]

Does her sister routinely smell her sister's vag?

[Jerri Blank]

Not Guilty! Angelica Swartout released from jail

Eugene (KMTR) - Angelica Swartout is a free woman! After two weeks of testimony, a Lane county jury needed just two hours on Thursday to reach a not guilty verdict in the re-trial.

The Springfield woman was accused of killing her newborn baby and throwing it in a dumpster where she worked in October of 2010.

After the verdict, Swartout was released from the Lane County jail with her family waiting outside.

It was Swartout's family that turned her in after they say Angelica told them she had a miscarriage. They told police and later testified in court that she was clearly pregnant.

Initially Swartout confessed to the killing, however, the Lane County Sheriff's Office searched the landfill and found nothing, and Swartout says she lied to investigators during the confession.

Swartout's first trial ended in a hung jury with a lone jury member firmly in favor of a not guilty verdict. Had one more jury member said guilty, Swartout would have been facing life in prison.

Swartout's defense attorney, Gordon Mallon says that jury member in the original trial prevented Swartout from spending years in prison that she didn't deserve. "We want to thank the jury, And we want to thank the juror from the last trial, George Bruce who saw the obvious and stood up for what he knew was right."

Minutes after the verdict, an close friend of Swartout's thanked the jury. "She's a lovely girl. She has such a love for kids. That's something that didn't come out this whole time, she has such a big heart and such a love for kids she would never do this."

http://www.kmtr.com/news/local/story...VkZlPsumw.cspx

[Obsolete]

I'm glad, I never believed there was a baby to begin with.