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The Battalion
Wednesday, August 22,
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T<
Journal contends Board commutes I If I had a hammer
physicians ignore
domestic violence
convict’s execution
CHICAGO (AP) — The most
common cause of women’s injuries
— getting abused at home — occurs
more often than auto accidents,
muggings and rapes combined, but
is largely ignored by doctors, a medi
cal journal reports.
Twenty-two percent to 35 percent
of women who visit emergency de
partments have abuse-related symp
toms, either physical or stress-re
lated, said the report in Wednesday’s
Journal of the American Medical As
sociation.
“Thirty-four percent of all female
homicide victims older than 15 years
are killed by their husbands or inti
mate partners,” said the report by
JAMA Associate Editor Teri Ran
dall, citing FBI data from 1976 to
1987.
“While most clinicians wouldn’t
consider discharging a patient with a
life-threatening condition, data
from emergency department re
cords show that a majority of women
who are victims of domestic abuse
are discharged without any arrange
ments made for their safety, to re
turn to the same abusive
relationships that caused their inju
ries,” the report said.
Dr. Mark Rosenberg, director of
injury control for the national Cen
ters for Disease Control, told the
journal, “The only physicians who
ask about violence are psychiatrists,
and they’re only interested if it oc
curs in a dream. They rarely ask
about the violent events that occur in
real life.”
But Dr. Jack Allison, vice presi
dent of the American College of
Emergency Physicians, said the re
port overstated doctors’ shortcom
ings and failed to indicate how often
women are unwilling to implicate
their batterers.
And “there are still times, unfor
tunately, when women go back to
those relationships — they choose
not to go to shelter, choose not to
press charges, choose not to get out
of the abusive situation.
ATLANTA (AP) — The state
Board of Pardon and Paroles on
Tuesday commuted the death sen
tence of a repentant convict after re
ceiving pleas for mercy from Mother
Teresa, Jesse Jackson and relatives
of the murder victim.
William Neal Moore’s defenders
call him a born-again Christian who
has been a positive influence on
other prisoners. Moore, 39, had
been scheduled to die Wednesday in
Georgia’s electric chair, but won a
stay of execution earlier Tuesday
from the U.S. Supreme Court.
members felt considerable informa
tion about Moore “might have come
out in a trial of the case,” Snow said.
He also noted that members of
the victim’s family had asked the
board to spare Moore’s life. “That’s
not something we often see,” Snow
said.
Moore was a depressed 23-year-
old soldier from Fort Gordon when
a friend told him about an old man
who kept $20,000 cash in his home,
according to evidence in the case.
Moore got drunk and entered the
home of 77-year-old Fredger Sta
pleton. When Stapleton fired a gun
at him, Moore said he panicked and
shot back, killing the man.
The parole board heard Monday
from Mother Teresa, the Nobel
Peace Prize winner, who called from
Calcutta, India, and urged the panel
to “do what Jesus would do,” said
staff member Marsha Bailey, who
took the call. Jackson, the former
Democratic presidential candidate,
wired the board on Saturday to urge
clemency.
Snow said Moore, under Georgia
law, will not be eligible for parole
consideration until he has served 25
years in prison, meaning Moore will
have to wait nine more years.
Chairman Wayne Snow Jr. said he
believed the board’s unanimous de
cision was based largely on the fact
that Moore, who pleaded guilty, did
The be
not have a jury trial. The board
Moore has written Stapleton’s
family members “a lot of times from
prison, that he’s sorry, and that he
hopes the family can forgive him,”
said Loretta Jordan Farmer, Sta
pleton’s great-niece. “And I can.”
. Photo by Sondra Robbins
John McMahon, a graduate student and resident director for
Puryear Hall, builds a loft outside the dorm building
Soviet revolutionary’s murder Commission says fear, bigotry hamper
commemorated in Mexico City ti eatment °f mra ^ Americans with AIDS
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Fifty years after Soviet revo
lutionary Leon Trotsky was assassinated with an ice axe
in Mexico City, city fathers hailed him as a symbol of
Mexico’s policy of granting asylum to exiles regardless
of political stripe.
Trotsky is being honored and called a visionary, and
the restored Trotsky house was inaugurated as a city-
run museum.
Mayor Manuel Camacho Solis said at Monday’s cere
monies, “In current times, the most profound signifi
cance of this house is in communicating that what hap
pened here should never again happen again:
harassing and taking the life of someone who thinks
differently.”
“What Trotsky predicted — the end of the system
that persecuted him — is today being achieved,” said
another speaker, political historian Adolfo Sanchez
Vazquez.
Trotsky died on Aug. 22, 1940, 26 hours after Soviet
dictator Josef Stalin had his political rival murderously
assaulted at Trotsky’s home-m-exile in the fashionable
Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacan.
The assassin, who struck Trotsky in the skull with a
mountaineer’s ice axe after Trotsky returned from a
seafood restaurant, spent 20 years in prison. His iden
tity was a mystery, but he was thought to be a Spaniard,
Ramon del Rio Mercader, also known as Jacques Morn-
ard and Frank Jackson.
The house, formerly maintained on meager funds
donated by Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkow, and
members of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers
Party, was given a meticulous facelift.
The city spent more than $230,000 to refurbish it
and build the adjacent Asylum Rights and Public Free
dom Institute.
The institute affirms Mexico’s policy of providing
political asylum to exiles, regardless of ideology, offi
cials said at the ceremony.
“It is a transformation of history into an instrument
of rights,” institute board member Javier Wimer told
about 200 people.
Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, arrived in Mex
ico in January 1937, after Stalin ordered Trotsky’s exile
and execution. The two leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik
revolution were locked in a power struggle as the health
of Vladimir I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet state,
waned.
Camacho said Trotsky’s exile in Mexico was an exam
ple of this country’s overall international and internal
policy — “Everyone was against Trotsky and the presi
dent of the republic received him in Mexico.”
it
In current times, the most profound
significance of this house is in
communicating that what happened here
should never again happen again:
harassing and taking the life of someone
who thinks differently.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — An “epi
demic of fear and bigotry” prevents
many rural Americans infected with
the AIDS virus from getting needed
care, the National Commission on
Aids said in a report Tuesday.
The commission also said too few
minorities, women and children are
included in experimental-drug test
ing and that too many physicians
and dentists still won’t treat people
with AIDS.
“We have to do much better to ed
ucate everybody to this durable new
threat (of AIDS) in our environ
ment,” said Dr. June Osborn, chair
woman of the 15-member commis
sion that advises Congress and the
White House.
The report was the commission’s
third, and as with the earlier two, the
panel emphasized the urgency of the
situation and called for “swift ac-
Panel members, who earlier this
year went to Georgia and Texas to
learn about the impact of AIDS, said
education about the disease is “vir
tually nonexistent and desperately
needed in rural communities.”
The report described the experi
ences of people who had been re
jected by their church, lost their jobs
and were evicted from their apart
ments because of their AIDS infec-
“Ignorance and misinformation
are seriously hampering, if not crip
pling efforts to treat” rural Ameri
cans with AIDS, it said.
The report recognized federal ef
forts to include more minorities in
government-funded clinical trials,
but said, “We can and must do bet-
The panel said N1H should
that research a higher priority wliik
continuing work on drugs that an
on the AIDS virus.
Turning to health-care personnel
the commission said it “heard re
peatedly about a serious shortaged
dentists willing to treat people
HIV infection and AIDS.”
The report related the expen
ences of one witness who said die
only two dentists in his communiti
who would accept Medicaid dedinei
to see him because he was infected
with HIV.
ter.
-Manuel Camacho Solis,
mayor of Mexico City
He lauded the government’s policy on political asylum,
but added that Camacho’s presence “doesn’t change the
fact that there are other rights that are not respected by
the government of the Institutional Revolutionary
Party.”
tion.
“We’re very late in responding to
a massive problem, but getting later
makes no sense at all,” said Osborn,
dean of the University of Michigan
School of Public Health.
The report said that “in rural
America, there is an epidemic of
fear and bigotry, fanned by the ab
sence of education and knowledge,”
surrounding AIDS and the human
immunodeficiency virus, or HIV,
that causes the disease.
African-Americans and Hispanics
account for 43 percent of all AIDS
cases, but they make up only 23 per
cent of clinical trial participants, the
report said.
Children and women of child
bearing age usually have been ex
cluded from clinical trials, but the
panel said that must change.
The report also said the National
Institutes of Health had moved too
slowly to find drugs to manage op
portunistic infections, which are the
cause of death for most AIDS pa
tients.
“One dentist’s excuse was that his
office was carpeted and he would
not be able to sterilize the room after
the visit," the report said. "Theother
dentist said she had plants and could
not take the risk of him infecting her
plants and her plants then infecting
her other patients.”
Too many physicians also are re
fusing to see AIDS patients.
And like many dentists, they a|>
pear to be unaware that the virus
spread through blood and body flu
ids — mostly through sex or needle
sharing by intravenous drug users-
not casual contact, the commission
said.
“Effective AIDS education pro
grams are needed for all health cart
workers,” the report said;
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