Lindsay Nagel baby Rico Trial updates: "Kafkaesque."

Thought Crime Trial Against Nagel/Martinez Family Adjourned By Celia Farber

Brownsdale, MN

This is a short dispatch written to convey the essential facts of what happened on April 1 and 2, in the court case against John Martinez and Lindsey Nagel, parents of Rico Martinez Nagel. 

It’s early morning in Brownsdale MN, a very small town near the Iowa border, about two hours from Minneapolis.  I am soon to depart for the airport and struggling to compose a coherent narrative of a completely incoherent situation.

I’ll start at the end: No decision was reached by the judge in the two day trial in which Lindsey Nagel and John Martinez were (vaguely) accused of Medical Endangerment; The prosecution (“petitioner”) did many inexplicable things throughout the trial, not least of which was to play 4 videos from YouTube, which has not previously been vetted as evidence. That meant delay: The videos have to be transcribed, the transcripts put before judge and opposing legal teams, and the case reconvened. This is expected to happen at best in 15 days. For now, the parents retain custody and a recommendation was made by a guardian ad litem that they should revisit the situation in 45 days to see if compliance was still consistent. If it were, Skype surveillance may be reduced from twice a day to three times a week.So for now, the situation for John and Lindsey Nagel is the same: They retain physical custody of their 3 month old son Rico, and the state controls his medical decisions, i.e. has medical custody.  Still, each day, twice a day they must hold the baby in front of a Skype camera, with a social worker on the other end, which I witnessed; They first hold up each medicine bottle (Rico is on 3 “anti-HIV” medications,  Bactrim, and a drug to regulate his disrupted red and white blood cell counts,) then they draw the liquids into the tube attached to Rico’s stomach via gastric intubation (a plastic tube surgically implanted into his stomach,) while the social worker watches.
 

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