GUILTY TX - Emma Thompson, 4, dies with STD, skull fracture, Spring, 27 June 2009

Judge: Courier doesn’t have to release online posters’ names

By Nancy Flake
Updated: 06.15.10

Houston Community Newspapers, owner of The Courier, used the recently passed Shield Law to block release of the names of 35 online posters who commented on stories about a Magnolia man accused in the death of a 4-year-old girl last year.

Visiting Judge Lloyd Douglas Shaver, in the 232nd Criminal Court, on Tuesday granted an HCN motion to quash a subpoena by the attorney for Lucas Ruric Coe, 28. Coe is charged in Harris County with felony injury to a child in the death of Emma Thompson, who died June 27, 2009, of blunt abdominal trauma.

Shaver’s ruling upholds the Texas Shield Law passed last year by the Texas Legislature. The law protects journalists and anonymous bloggers from turning over sources unless under a “very stringent and well-defined set of circumstances,” said an official with the Texas Daily Newspaper Association, which worked toward passage of the Shield Law.

The law previously had been tested successfully in Abilene when a Taylor County judge ruled in July 2009 that the Abilene Reporter-News did not have to disclose identities of online commenters on a story concerning a murder and the teenage defendant, according to the Citizen Media Law Project website.

Shaver, however, denied motions to quash subpoenas for posters’ identities from The Houston Chronicle and KTRK-Channel 13 in Houston, said Ronald Guy Jones, Coe’s attorney. A subpoena for KHOU Channel 11 in Houston had been withdrawn.

[SNIPPED]

Coe has a trial date of Sept. 13 for both his cases in Harris and Montgomery counties, Jones said.


...much more at link:

http://www.hcnonline.com/articles/2010/06/15/conroe_courier/news/coe061610.txt
 
TY, Curious-what a waste of time, effort and paper. This kind of skirmishing diminishes this child. As if it is possible to diminish her even more. :(. I want justice so badly here, but there is none really to be had at the end of the day. Senseless.
 
Court decision upholds protection of sources for journalists, bloggers

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 10:06 pm | Updated: 3:12 am, Wed Jun 16, 2010.

BY NANCY FLAKE East Texas Community Newspapers |

[SNIPPED] ... entire article at this link: http://www.news-journal.com/news/local/article_a4575b7f-efa1-5c21-85b1-5e5f8d699769.html

Shaver, however, denied motions to quash subpoenas for posters' identities from The Houston Chronicle and KTRK-Channel 13 in Houston, said Ronald Guy Jones, Coe's attorney. A subpoena for KHOU Channel 11 in Houston had been withdrawn.

"We passed on it because they gave us the information we wanted," Jones said of the KHOU subpoena. Neither The Houston Chronicle nor KTRK-Channel 13 have turned over any information, Jones said late Tuesday afternoon.

"They filed the motion to quash, and they didn't show up to support it," he said of attorneys for The Chronicle.

Chronicle officials declined comment, and KTRK officials did not return calls.

When the subpoena initially was filed in September 2009, the Chronicle reported it would notify commenters in question so they could make their own objections. In the article, the Chronicle reported that its Terms of Service and Privacy inform online users that their names may be disclosed in response to litigation.
 
Abigail Young has a court date at the Harris County District Court on 06/28/2010 at 9:00 a.m.
 
A year after a suburban 4-year-old's gruesome death helped force a state review of child abuse investigations in Houston, there's little else to show that Emma Thompson passed through this world. She's buried next to a grandfather she never met and no formal headstone is placed on her tiny grave, which features a humble funeral home marker and half-dead petunias.

from the Chron. link above

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET A GRAVESTONE IN PLACE?

It's been a year!
 
This mother is really going to jail for this. She cleaned up the bathroom with bleach before she took her daughter to the hospital? Right. She bruised her daughter's thighs by pulling her out of the car? Right. TMI right off the bat. She is guilty.
 
This mother is really going to jail for this. She cleaned up the bathroom with bleach before she took her daughter to the hospital? Right. She bruised her daughter's thighs by pulling her out of the car? Right. TMI right off the bat. She is guilty.

She was a nurse! She lied to CPS about the scum she had living in her home with her 3 young daughters and protected him at every turn.
 
Finally, something from her hometown newspaper

http://www.brenhambanner.com/articles/2010/06/28/news/news01.txt

Investigators say that when Emma died, there were indications she had been sexually abused and had been beaten; that she had 80 bruises, a severed pancreas and fractured skull and that Young failed to prevent the injuries that ultimately killed her child.
 
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image5234276x.jpg

Emma Thompson

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This mother is really going to jail for this. She cleaned up the bathroom with bleach before she took her daughter to the hospital? Right. She bruised her daughter's thighs by pulling her out of the car? Right. TMI right off the bat. She is guilty.

I hadn't seen that info released until today. Goodness!

Explanation to neighbors
Julius Villarreal, who lives across the street, remembers the night well.

Instead of ducking into her two-story home to grieve the loss of her youngest, he said a dry-eyed Young talked to investigators and then addressed the group of neighbors, almost as if she was trying to "set up" the story they would hear later of her daughter's violent injuries.

Villarreal said Young told them in great detail that Emma had fallen off the toilet in the bathroom, cracking her skull and splitting her lip. She also told them how she theorized it was a diabetic seizure. She then talked about how there was a lot of bruising on the girl caused by CPR attempts by emergency responders. Young even told how there was bruising on the little girl's thighs because of the great force she used to pull Emma from the car once she passed out.

Villarreal said he was struck by how everyday Young's demeanor was despite losing a child that night.

"To me, she acted calm, like she had lost $5," Villarreal said.

Young made a great show of telling the group that Coe was good to her and her girls, that he never harmed anyone, Villarreal said. And after investigators left, Young told neighbors they could come over to the house. There was nothing disturbing to see, she told them, because she had cleaned up the bathroom before she left for the hospital.

"'I bleached the bathroom,'" Villarreal recalled Young telling them.

A call for comment, made to Young's mother's home, was not returned.

[snipped]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7083574.html
 

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