The Valerie Carlton Case Summary

Valerie Carlton was a battered wife who lost custody of her pre-school daughter in Harford County, Maryland in 2007.   This phenomenon is not uncommon in the U.S. because mothers are called "vindictive" if they complain about abuse by fathers.

Her ex-husband, a fundamentalist Christian, wanted her visitation with her daughter canceled, especially because Valerie had returned to her own religion, Judaism, and was practicing Jewish rituals of candle lighting and Sabbath observance on her weekend visits.   Meanwhile, Valerie was moving on with her life.   She met and fell in love with a Jewish man in March 2008 and by late summer had become pregnant by him.   She believed he was planning to marry her, and she would then have a stable Jewish home in which to raise both children, for she was planning to return to court and seek custody after she accomplished this.   The idea of his daughter going to live in a Jewish home with her mother was, of course, very distasteful to the ex-husband.   He interfered with her visitation repeatedly during the period when she was pregnant and planning her remarriage.

Suddenly, although the daughter lived in nearby Anne Arundel County (which would therefore have jurisdiction over any child abuse or neglect investigation), the County of Harford independently initiated a child abuse action against Valerie, claiming that she had caused her daughter to masturbate (when she was not even with her mom) by sexually molesting the girl.   There was no evidence.   Yet Harford County brought the child in for an interview in which the girl (a) denied any abuse by her mother; (b) alleged physical abuse by her father; and (c) concluded the interview by stating, "I just want to see my mommy more!"

Immediately Harford County issued a "no contact" order cutting mother off from child and accusing her of sexual abuse of her own child and neighborhood children as well.   This all happened while Valerie was 9 months pregnant and her baby's father, far from finally deciding to marry her, was refusing to marry her or even to pay the hospital bills for the birth of his baby.   In summer 2009 Valerie was faced with her ex-husband denying her visitation with her daughter and her boyfriend refusing to marry her or even to financially help with the baby she expected.

The trumping up of criminal charges to keep Valerie away from her daughter for religious reasons was transparent.   The charging documents and the search warrants issued both made note of the fact that Valerie was an Orthodox Jew practicing Jewish rituals with her daughter on visitation days.   No finding of abuse had been made in Child Protective Services before the indictments were drawn for crimes of child abuse.   Valerie was not even present, or represented, at the hearing where it was decided that she had caused her daughter to masturbate.   (Her daughter, questioned about touching herself,   explained that her genitals had itched ever since she had chicken pox.)

On April 15, 2009, four days after Valerie's baby was born, Harford County police seized the baby and threw him into foster care, with his own father's approval (because he wanted to get custody of the baby and take him to Israel, which Valerie would not agree to because her daughter still lived in Maryland).   Two months later, in foster care (on June 11, 2009), the baby died from child endangerment and neglect in the state of Delaware.   The Maryland foster care agency denied all liability or accountability for the death.

Worse, the mother, Valerie, had been arrested by that time (on May 27, 2009) on 28 trumped up felony charges including a charge of child endangerment, described as her having given tainted breast milk to a newborn.   The newborn was her baby, and there was no forensic evidence that her breast milk was tainted.   Valerie was informed of her baby's death while she was in jail, but the prosecutor arranged that the Chaplain was not permitted to perform this duty; instead it was done by an employee of the Sheriff's office who brutally announced that the baby was dead, and then had Valerie strapped into a medieval torture de!=vice, called a "restraint chair," so that she choked on her own mucus as she wept and tried to pray for her dead baby.   The Sheriff's department claimed, in writing, that Valerie was "talking in tongues" because she was praying in Hebrew.   An employee of the Sheriff's Department apparently told this nonsense to the ex-husband's family, who spread the rumor that Valerie was insane because of the way she responded to the death of her baby.

Abuses were heaped upon abuses as she was held for 13 months in solitary confinement until a privately-hired lawyer (Isaac Klein, Esq. from Baltimore) was substituted for Harford County public defender John Janowich (who had been cooperating with the program of abuse and coercion) and demanded either trial or release.   Realizing that they could not hold Valerie once she had real representation, however, the jail staged an "attack on a correctional officer," on March 8 2010, which was very obviously a beating administered to Valerie by a guard.   (See :   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQN1jWn5P0Q )

Now the County had new charges that they could prosecute, so as not to be sued for false arrest and a slew of other constitutional civil rights violations -- oldest trick in the book.   Valerie was forced to plead guilty to a misdemeanor (violating a protective order by trying to speak with her daughter's teacher) in order to gain her release on June 30 2010.  

After her release, however, she fled Maryland after being informed that the jail guards were now speaking about what they were planning to do to her when she was returned to the jail. One of the major motivations for Harford County to get Valerie into prison or a state psychiatric hospital was, of course, to protect themselves against the lawsuit she would otherwise file against them for all the violations of her civil rights.

Valerie was arrested on October 11, 2011 in Monsey, New York when the ex-husband got wind of the fact that her mother, the child's grandmother, was seeking visitation with the little girl whose last words on the subject had been:   "I just want to see my mommy more!"

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