By Rob Jennings, Daily Record
12/14/04 - Posted from the Daily Record newsroom
Morris County NOW chapter president Mavra Stark, who ignited a national uproar last year when she said Scott Peterson shouldn't have been charged with murdering his unborn son, was saying the same thing on Monday after a jury recommended the death penalty.
"I still feel pretty much the same way I did," Stark said Monday evening.
"I probably would have said, 'Let's focus on the violence against a woman who happens to be probably half his weight and half his size -- plus, she's pregnant,'" Stark added.
Stark said she felt no sympathy for Peterson, 32, convicted by a California jury of murdering his wife Laci and her 8-month-old fetus who was to have been named Conner.
Stark said that Laci's fetus was viable and deserved some measure of legal protection, but explained that she remained troubled by fetal homicide statutes such as the law in California.
Laws equating the killing of a fetus with murder, she said, risk establishing a "slippery slope" that might eventually erode a woman's right to choose an abortion.
"The whole issue is not, is abortion right or wrong. It's do we want to keep it safe," said Stark, adding that she felt "ambivalent" about the jury's sentencing recommendation.
Her remarks echoed statements she made shortly after Peterson's arrest in April 2003 that were widely distributed on the Internet and 24-hour cable news channels.
The longtime activist from Montville was vilified by conservative talk show hosts but defended by pro-choice supporters who argued that fetal homicide laws -- including new federal legislation in Laci and Conner's names -- are predicated on hidden agendas even though legal abortions are specifically excluded from prosecution.
Laurie Lowenstein of Red Bank, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice New Jersey, charged Monday that "the whole (Peterson) case was just a ploy to get points from the fundamentalist right and anti-choice organizations -- to just create another opportunity to establish the fetus as citizen."
Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll, R-Morris Twp., a pro-lifer, said he hoped the Peterson trial had weakened abortion rights by spotlighting the love Laci's family felt for her unborn son.
"Eventually, there will come a time in the maturation of our species that we'll look back on abortion the same way we look back on slavery. This case was a step in that direction," Carroll said.
California is one of approximately two dozen states with fetal homicide laws. New Jersey has no such law, meaning that Peterson would have been charged only with murdering his wife had the crime occurred here.
Had Peterson been charged only with killing his wife, he would not have been eligible for the death penalty in California, which may be imposed by the judge at his sentencing in February.
Unlike Lowenstein, who mused that Peterson's prosecutors had been influenced by the pro-life Bush Administration -- "the administration's arm is pretty strong," she said -- Stark wasn't questioning anyone's motives.
"I think this guy was a horrible guy, no question about it," Stark said of Peterson.
"It was unnecessary," she said of the murders. "There's such a thing as divorce."
Stark, who was re-elected as the local NOW chapter's president following last year's controversy, plans to step down in January. She said she remains wounded by the publicity her comments generated.
"The experience.....was just terrible in a number of ways," Stark said.
Copyright 2004 Daily Record.
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