Kate Sheppard

Reporter

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She was previously the political reporter for Grist and a writing fellow at The American Prospect. She can be reached by email at ksheppard (at) motherjones (dot) com.

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Her work has also been featured in the New York Times' Room for Debate blog, the Guardian's Comment Is Free, Foreign Policy, High Country News, The Center for Public Integrity, the Washington Independent, Washington Spectator, Who Runs Gov, In These Times, and Bitch. She was raised on a vegetable farm in southern New Jersey (yes, they do exist), but has adapted well to life in the nation's capital. She misses trees and having a congressional representative with voting power, but thinks DC is pretty great anyway.

Why "Feticide" Charges Are More Complicated Than They Seem

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue May. 14, 2013 2:38 PM PDT

Prosecutors in Ohio have indicated that they will seek murder charges against Ariel Castro, the man they believe kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned three women in his house for roughly a decade. The murder charges stem from reports that he raped, impregnated and abused one of the women, Michelle Knight, causing her to miscarry multiple pregnancies.

"I fully intend to seek charges for each and every act of sexual violence, rape, each day of kidnapping, every felonious assault, and each act of aggravated murder for terminating pregnancies that the offender perpetrated," Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said at a news conference late last week. Ohio prosecutors are assessing whether they could seek the death penalty against Castro.

Thirty-eight states have laws on the books that make killing a fetus in a violent act a separate crime from the harm done to the pregnant woman, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ohio has had a feticide law since 1996. Although there is broad agreement on the idea that Castro should be prosecuted for his alleged crimes, the use of this type of "feticide" law makes some in the world of reproductive rights and law nervous, since these laws move toward the kind of "fetal personhood" measures that anti-abortion groups have tried to push to define a fetus as a full and separate human being.

"What Castro is accused of doing is so horrendous it defies comprehension. He allegedly forced Ms. Knight to become pregnant, and then forced her to miscarry—nobody disagrees that he should be punished for this," Farah Diaz-Tello, a staff attorney at National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told Mother Jones. "But when the law treats fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses as legally separate from the pregnant women who carry them, the door is open to a host of problematic consequences for pregnant women."

The concern is that this sort of law could in turn be used to prosecute women for seeking an abortion or other potential or perceived harms to a fetus. And as I've reported here before, women already have been prosecuted under this type of law in some states.

Lindsey Beyerstein has a great piece at RH Reality Check looking at the legal issues at hand in the case. Michelle Goldberg also makes an elegant argument against the murder charge at The Daily Beast:

But if he is convicted of capital murder, it will ultimately be an injustice—not to him, but to the rest of us. That's because it will mean that legally, ending a pregnancy is a greater crime than keeping three human beings locked in a squalid dungeon for a decade. Such a precedent will have implications beyond this terrible case.

Emily Bazelon made a similar point about this over at Slate. As Diaz-Tello puts it, "The acts of torture Castro allegedly committed against these three women are certainly more than enough to put him away for life without going down roads that lead to locking up pregnant women."

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Judge: Obama Admin.'s Emergency Contraception Argument Is "Something Out of an Alternate Reality"

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri May. 10, 2013 10:56 AM PDT

On Friday, US District Court Judge Edward Korman went all Dikembe Mutombo on the Obama administration's request to delay implementation of his ruling that emergency contraception be made available over the counter to everyone within 30 days. The Department of Justice announced last week that it is appealing Korman's April 5 decision.

Korman's latest order rejecting the request of a stay is, to put it nicely, highly critical of the Obama administration, calling the DOJ's appeal "frivolous" and an "administrative agency filibuster."

In its appeal, the DOJ claimed that Korman's April 5 decision "undermines the regulatory procedures governing FDA's drug approval process." But Korman calls this argument "something out of an alternate reality," given that the FDA's scientists approved it for use over the counter when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled their decision in December 2011, implementing an age limit of 17. Sebelius, he writes, "completely lacks" the scientific expertise to decide whether a drug is safe and effective.

Korman also accuses the administration of "sugarcoating" its effort to block access by lowering the age for one brand of emergency contraception, Plan B One-Step, on the day before they filed the appeal. The administration has suggested a three-tiered system that Korman explains as:

(1) women 15 years of age or older with adequate proof of age will be permitted to purchase Plan B One-Step, which will only be available on the shelves in stores with on-site pharmacies;
(2) other levonorgestrel-based products will remain behind the counter, but will be available without a prescription to women over 17 years of age who have government issued proof of age; and,
(3) women who lack adequate proof of age or are under the age of 15 will not have access to Plan B One-Step and must obtain a prescription for another levonorgestrel-based contraceptive product.

Korman calls this proposal "convoluted" and "nonsensical."

Further, he notes, the Obama administration's plan still harms all women seeking access to emergency contraception, because they will need to a government-issued identification to prove their age. This is a particular burden on young women, poor women, and minorities, who are less likely to have that ID.

It would, however, benefit Teva, the company that makes Plan B One-Step, Korman writes:

The benefits the proposal would confer on Teva were not insignificant. Because, as the Assistant United States Attorney observed, 99% of Plan B One-Step consumers are aged 15 and above, Teva would lose next to nothing in the way of revenue by limiting sales to those women. On the other hand, Teva’s proposal would enable it to have its product, and its product alone, displayed on the shelves in the family planning area of stores with an on-site pharmacy. Thus, a consumer looking for an emergency contraceptive would only find Plan B One-Step on the shelves, and if she came in after the pharmacy counter was closed, her only option would be Plan B One-Step. If she were under the age of 15, she would have no option, because she could only obtain levonorgestrel-based emergency contraceptives with a prescription.

Moreover, because the FDA claimed that one of the studies conducted by Teva—the so-called "actual use" study—was essential to the approval of Teva’s proposal, Teva enjoys three years of marketing exclusivity to the 15 and 16 year old consumers. The pharmaceutical companies that sell "brand X" versions of Plan B One-Step as well as the two-pill package of the drug could not display their products on the shelf because the old marketing regime remains in effect for them, and their products can only be sold from behind the pharmacy counter. Anyone under the age of 17 needs a prescription to obtain these products, and anyone over the age of 17 can only obtain them from the pharmacy by showing proof-of-age identification.

While this proposal was a boon to Teva, it did little to eliminate the practical obstructions in obtaining emergency contraception to women of child-bearing age whether over or under age 15. On the contrary, Teva will use its privileged marketing status and exclusivity to increase the cost of the drug. The price of Plan B One-Step under the new marketing regime is expected to be $60, significantly more than the one- or two-pill generic version, and could conceivably go higher, if only to accommodate the more expensive packing, age-verification tags, and anti-theft technology that the new marketing arrangement would require. The cost of all emergency contraception, particularly Plan B One-Step, which is the most expensive, is already an impediment to access for many women and adolescents.

The DOJ has until noon on Monday, May 13 to try to appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay.

Arkansans to Kerry on Keystone: "Come to Our State to See the Devastation"

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri May. 10, 2013 3:05 AM PDT

Genieve Long holds a photo of her son at a rally outside the State Department on Thursday.

Two residents of Mayflower, Arkansas, the site of the March 29 pipeline spill, traveled to Washington on Thursday to ask Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

They came here, Genieve Long said, to ask Kerry to "come to our state to see the devastation and hopefully get the Keystone XL stopped." They are working with All Risk, No Reward, a coalition of local and national groups that oppose the proposed 1,600-mile pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to Texas.

"I'm just a concerned single daddy who happens to have 400 feet of this pipeline running through his property."

Long and her four children—ages 9, 8, 7, and 5—live beside Lake Conway, not far from where Exxon's Pegasus pipeline spilled at least 210,000 gallons of crude oil from Canada's tar sands into a subdivision. Exxon has said that while there is oil in a cove on the lake, clean up crews haven't seen oil in the main body of water. But Sierra Club has said that an independent contractor the group hired found evidence of oil in the lake. Long thumbed through photos on her phone on Thursday morning, showing me images of oily sheen and what appeared to be black residue along the shores.

She says that Exxon has not been responsive to the complaints of people who live outside the area where the oil originally spilled. "I've asked them to just relocate us due to the smells," she said, noting that several of her children have asthma. "They told us the air quality was fine and they wouldn't relocate us." She's maintaining a Google Map that catalogs where people have reported seeing or smelling oil or experiencing negative health effects, as well as photos and video. She's also maintaining a Facebook page on the spill.

Reported oil sheen on Palarm Creek, off of Lake Conway. Genieve Long.

The oil is bad, but so is the cleanup, she says. "It's horrible. They have roads blocked down to one lane, constant police, constant traffic."

She was joined in Washington by fellow Mayflower resident Damien Byers, whose house is about a half a mile from the spill site and sits atop another portion of the Pegasus pipeline. He worries about the air quality in the area, especially when his 15-month-old son is staying with him. "I'm not an environmentalist, I'm not a treehugger," says Byers. "I'm just a concerned single daddy who happens to have 400 feet of this pipeline running through his property."

The pair delivered a letter to the State Department from a group of 21 residents of the town who have organized as the "Remember Mayflower Coalition." The letter asks Secretary Kerry to reject the Keystone pipeline—particularly in light of the Arkansas spill:

There is still so much we don’t know about tar sands—about the economic risks of them spilling in communities, about how they impact important water sources, and about how they effect our health. We don’t know enough to say "yes" to a massive tar sands pipeline through the country’s heartland.

Before you issue your final evaluation of Keystone XL, we ask that you and your staff come to Mayflower to see what happens when a tar sands pipeline ruptures in your backyard. We ask that you observe the remnants of black tar, smell the toxic chemicals that are polluting our air, and ask yourselves whether you can in good conscience inflict this same devastation on families along Keystone XL’s route.

"If this can happen to Mayflower," Long said, "with this Keystone pipeline, it can happen to anybody else also. We're trying to keep that from happening."

Republicans Boycott Vote on Obama's EPA Pick

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu May. 9, 2013 11:03 AM PDT

U.S. President Barack Obama announces Gina McCarthy as his nominee to head the EPA in a March 4 ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

The Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted a Thursday morning meeting in which they were supposed to vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans on the committee complained that she had not yet adequately responded to their questions.

The vote had been scheduled for 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, but none of the committee's Republican members showed up.

Politico reports on what transpired:

Committee ranking member David Vitter (R-La.) announced the boycott by all eight GOP members around 8:30 a.m., saying they would deny the panel a quorum because McCarthy and the EPA haven't provided answers to the questions they'd posed.

Democrats have noted that the questions totaled more than 1,000 — what they call a record. Republicans also had five "requests" for EPA on issues such as how the agency handles outside groups' threats of litigation — though Democrats said the GOP senators were actually asking the agency to offer major concessions in how it conducts public business.

Democrats on the committee were quick to attack Republicans for this "obstruction." Committee chair Barbara Boxer noted that the vote had already been delayed for three weeks to accommodate the panel's Republican members.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid railed on the effort to block McCarthy in a statement on Thursday, noting that the GOP has also blocked President Obama's nominee to head the Department of Labor, Thomas Perez. "This type of blanket, partisan obstruction used to be unheard of," Reid said. "Now it has become an unacceptable pattern."

The blockade on McCarthy is even more noteworthy because, as we've reported here before, she worked for Mitt Romney back when he was governor of Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut's Republican former Gov. Jodi Rell.

Biden Said What About Keystone XL Pipeline?!?

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed May. 8, 2013 11:51 AM PDT

On Tuesday night, Buzzfeed reported that Vice President Joe Biden told an activist in South Carolina that he personally opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, but that he was "in the minority" in the administration on that opinion. The story prompted a press release from at least one anti-Keystone environmental group praising Biden for his "blunt talk." But Biden's office says that the VP's opinion on Keystone hasn't changed since an interview he gave last year: he's still waiting for the State Department to weigh in.

A spokesperson for the VP's office writes to Mother Jones:

The Vice President has made his views known on this issue and his views haven't changed. Any impression to the contrary would be mistaken. For instance, he said of the project in an interview last year, "It’s going to go through the process and the decision will be made on an environmentally sound basis."

The spokesperson also reiterated that "permitting decisions for international oil and gas pipelines are delegated to the State Department."

The Buzzfeed story came from the account of Elaine Cooper, an activist with the Sierra Club, who says Biden told her this during a rope line at a campaign event in South Carolina last Friday. Cooper recounted the encounter in a blog post as well:

I asked him about the administration’s commitment to making progress on climate and whether the president would reject the pipeline. He looked at the Sierra Club hat on my head, and he said “yes, I do – I share your views – but I am in the minority,” and he smiled.

In Cooper's post, she notes that Biden famously broke from the official administration position on gay marriage in an interview back in May 2012. His comment has been described as the "catalyst" for President Obama declaring just a few days later that he had evolved on gay marriage. This was apparently much sooner than the president had planned to make that announcement.

Was the Keystone line another case of Biden speaking out of turn? Who knows. Rope lines are crowded and loud, leaving room for misinterpretation. Besides, those things are usually more about glad-handing than they are about serious policy issues. But hey! It wouldn't be the first time the VP had staked out a position ahead of the rest of the administration.