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I shamelessly admit I was looking in another guild and found an interesting article.

http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=6634572
longer one can be found:
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0609evfetus0609.html

Basically, a man struck his pregnant girlfriend, got 16 years for killing her and 20 years for killing her fetus.

Is this because she's only worth 4/5ths of the fetus? Out of context it sounds a lot like that's the case, right?

No. It's because the laws were re-drawn to include a fetus in the laws that define actions that kill children as dangerous crimes against children. Not against unborn children, but children, and that carries larger penalties. Maybe women are only worth 4/5ths of a child in general. But I'm assuming if he had killed the same child as an infant, the penalty would have been the same, if not longer.

So I'd like to clarify things for people.

This was not about a fetus being worth more than a woman.

This was about crimes against a child carrying larger penalties than crimes against adults, and a fetus being classified as a child under these laws in cases when it's not a legal abortion. So gripe all you want, whoever wants to, but also complain when a man gets fifteen years for raping a child but ten for raping an adult (I'm too optimistic here, rapists get out in no time flat), or when a woman gets 25 years for killing her child but 15 for an adult (same with murderers). That's what this is about. Not about the unborn getting more protection than the born, but children getting more protection than adults.

If you don't like the laws, good for you, but it's not a group of pro-life people who say, "A fetus is worth more than a woman!" It's a group of pro-life people who say, "A fetus is worth the same as any other child!" And that's how they're treated under these laws, unless I'm misunderstanding something here.

It's not that a woman is worth 4/5ths of a fetus. It's that a crime against an adult is 4/5ths as bad as a crime against a child, in this instance.

It still is a rather odd occurrence, that this man (who is being punished as he very much deserves to be) got more time for killing his pregnant girlfriend's unborn child (I don't know if it was his or not), than for killing his pregnant girlfriend.

I can see, since the unborn human is protected as a child, why this would happen. And, actually, it does make sense that people who harm/kill children should get more jail time than those who harm/kill adults.

But yeah, I do see where someone, not knowing about the child law and the child status of unborn humans, could take such a sentencing as negative towards pregnant women.

I'm sort of guessing that in states without any Fetal Homicide laws, this man might have gotten the same sentence, but it would have been for the pregnant woman.

That's interesting. My feeling was they used it to book him for longer than they thought they could have with just one death. A lot of people get even less than 16 years for second degree murder. I think they were trying to add as much time onto the guy's sentence as possible, and that's why they brought in the second death, which they were able to squeeze more years from since it was classified as a dangerous crime against a child.

I think his defense was that he didn't mean to kill her. It was a crime of passion, he had no intention of killing her, and he made sure that 911 was called as soon as he realized how badly he'd hurt her. I think they tacked on the crime against the child as a way to keep him in jail. And honestly? I think he should be there as long as possible.

In Arizona. This is the first guy prosecuted under the new law resulting from the Laci Peterson mess.