Anti-Abortion Groups Hail Car-Crash Sentence Man Gets 16 Years In Death Of Unborn Baby After Accident
A drunken driver got 16 years in prison Monday for manslaughter in the death of a baby who was delivered prematurely after an auto accident.
The case is one of the first in Texas to test whether a person can be held criminally liable for harming an unborn child. Because it touched on the question of when life begins, it was closely watched by both sides in the abortion debate.
Frank Flores Cuellar, 50, had faced up to 20 years in prison in the death of Krystal Zuniga, who was delivered shortly after a June 15 car accident.
Cuellar’s blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit when he drove his truck into a car driven by Jeannie Coronado as she returned from a late-night trip to the grocery store.
Ms. Coronado, 7-1/2 months pregnant, gave birth to Krystal by emergency Caesarean section. The baby weighed just 4 pounds and suffered extensive brain damage, and died within two days.
The jury took only an hour to convict Cuellar last week of intoxication manslaughter. It took six hours to decide on a sentence Monday.
Cuellar - a laborer with no high school education and three previous drunken driving convictions - apologized after the sentence was read, saying: “I didn’t intend for any of this to happen.”
Anti-abortion activists hailed the verdict as a step toward tougher laws against criminals whose actions harm the unborn. Abortion rights supporters warned it could lead to a new determination of when life begins and, eventually, the outlawing of abortion.
Cuellar’s attorney, Anne Marshall promised to appeal, saying Cuellar should not have been prosecuted because Krystal was not yet born at the time of the accident. She repeatedly cited the state’s legal definition of a person as an individual “who has been born and is alive.”
The baby’s grandmother, Rebecca Coronado, said: “She wasn’t a fetus. She had a heartbeat. We lost her, but I know we won at the end.”
Outside court, a female juror said several members of the seven-woman, five-man panel had held out for probation.
“Several jurors felt that 20 years was too much and that he really needed help,” said the juror, who refused to give her name.
The same juror said the panel had no difficulty deciding to convict, despite the defense’s argument that Krystal was not a person when the accident occurred.
“The baby was human,” the juror said. “The baby had a birth certificate, a death certificate and died of injuries resulting from the accident.”
Several states have laws giving legal standing to unborn children in criminal cases. Similar legislation has been proposed in Texas in past years, but has not been passed.