Note: Rep. Peternel’s floor speech eloquently addresses the need for HB 1607’s exclusionary rule that was unfortunately taken out of the bill by a narrow majority in the House. We expect an amendment to be proposed to HB 1607 in the Senate to reintroduce the exclusionary rule. For the sake of time, Rep. Peternel abbreviated her speech on the house floor. However, we are publishing it in full here.
It’s important to note that this provision would not mean immunity from prosecution, but it does encourage use of the Safe Haven law by assuring the surrendering parent the state will not use the actual act of surrendering a child as a source of evidence against them. Evidence obtained by any other means is not excluded by the provision.
This will encourage more parents to surrender at-risk babies, serving the greater societal good of saving babies’ lives.
Rep. Peternel Floor Speech – HB 1607
I have one question for every member of the House. It is a simple question with an obvious answer—but it is the key to understanding all discussion about this bill.
Imagine that a woman who is a serious criminal—surrounded by drug abuse and violence—gives birth to a baby. This mother does not want, or knows she cannot handle, the responsibilities of raising this child. She would welcome an opportunity to anonymously wash her hands of the baby and surrender him to someone else.
Although it is not pleasant, I need to be clear about the situation I’m describing. Some parents who surrender their infants may be heroic, but the woman I am describing is no hero—and I cannot romanticize her. This mother feels no remorse for the serious crimes she has committed, perhaps including crimes of abuse. She wants to surrender this baby for one reason: because it would be in her self-interest to be rid of this child.
But this woman lives in New Hampshire, and she has heard the news. She knows that a mother just like her, Danielle Dauphinais, surrendered her baby to a New Hampshire hospital in 2021. And she knows that, instead of keeping Dauphinais’ identity anonymous, that hospital reported to the police, leading directly to her arrest for a separate murder charge and a litany of other crimes.
In other words, she knows that New Hampshire’s safe haven law has become a law enforcement tool to trap and catch criminal parents like her.
Again, the mother we are imagining is a criminal surrounded by crime. She realizes that, if she safely surrenders her baby, the hospital will identify her to the police, who will pursue and investigate her. Bringing her baby forward will directly and immediately expose her to the eye of the state.
As a result, she does not come forward to surrender her baby. Instead, she keeps the baby out of fear of arrest.
My question is this: What will happen to the baby?
If you take nothing else away from my remarks, carefully consider this question.
What – will – happen – to the baby?
Although this bill is bipartisan, I know that it will not pass unanimously. So if, for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, you vote against the bill, I ask that you at least be prepared to answer this question. It is the one question I will ask you if you and I discuss this bill.
What will happen to the baby?
So far, I have not heard a single critic of this bill answer that question. No legislator, no lobbyist, and no government official seems ready to say out loud what, if we do not pass this bill, will happen to the baby.
That’s because we know what will happen. As long as our safe havens are used as a tool of law enforcement to catch criminal parents, then, colleagues, that baby will die, be neglected, or – like Dauphinais’ first child – live a short life of unspeakable abuse.
Can anyone really believe that, if police and prosecutors frighten criminals away from safely surrendering a baby, the child will be safely raised in a stable home? That would be too ridiculous to say out loud.
Here is a hard but obvious reality: the mere fact that a baby’s parents leave him with a stranger, or in a box, shows that the baby is better off being surrendered than remaining with his parents. No baby is better off if his parents keep him only because they fear being arrested and jailed.
It should be just as obvious that, if we do not make these improvements to New Hampshire’s safe haven law, the law will simply no longer work. Dauphinais herself told police she used a safe haven because she thought it would allow her to rid herself of her baby without attracting attention from the authorities.
But she was wrong. And, if we do not change that fact now, the next such mother will not make the same mistake. Instead, she may decide it is more convenient to simply poison, starve, and bury the baby, just as Dauphinais had done to her previous child.
Already, those babies most in need of our law are not being brought forward. You all know that, in December of 2022, a homeless woman near Manchester gave birth in a tent and then abandoned the unclothed baby in the woods, causing the child to almost die of hypothermia. But we only know of that case because that homeless woman in question is the daughter of a famous athlete.
Not every at-risk baby in New Hampshire is the grandchild of a celebrity. You might recognize the name Alexandra Eckersley, but do you know the name Mattilynn Kitner?
Mattilyn was a baby girl born into a cesspool of meth addiction and other drug abuse in a Somersworth mobile home park in 2022. Mattilyn lived for 17 days until her mother and other adults, who were high on drugs, wedged her into the cushions of a couch, where she suffocated to death.
We only know about Mattilyn’s death because of a lawsuit filed last year. According to New Hampshire’s Child Fatality Review Committee, over the last 5-year period, there were 34 infant deaths in New Hampshire where abuse or neglect was not ruled out.
These infants need your help and protection right now.
There is a critical difference between babies and our other constituents.
There is a critical difference between this issue and almost all of the issues we consider in this House.
That difference is this: a helpless baby cannot drive to another state that has better safe haven laws. An infant’s life depends, directly and imminently, on when and how we vote. These babies are at the mercy of their parents, and only we can give those parents every incentive to save them.
This bill will do that. It will expand the age window in which parents can surrender their child, allow the optional construction of baby boxes to better protect parental anonymity and – most importantly – it will ensure that law enforcement and prosecutors can no longer use our safe havens as a tool to catch criminals.
Law enforcement and prosecutors have an important job to do – but we must ensure that they never again use our safe havens to do that job. Our safe haven laws were simply not meant to bring criminal parents to justice: they were meant to save babies – period.
As the New Hampshire Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys has explained, this is no different than other areas where we restrict the tools that law enforcement can use. Our laws exclude evidence obtained from illegal searches, but this does not mean we want criminals to go free. It means that police must use other tools, not illegal searches, to catch those criminals. In the same way, police must use other tools to catch criminals besides baby safe havens. It should be that simple.
Some object that, if we enact these protections, then parents who have physically harmed their child may escape punishment by surrendering the baby alive.
But, when you consider the question I asked you earlier, you can see that this objection is really – and there is no other way to put this – an objection that the baby is alive. The objection is that there will be no murder prosecution because we will have a live baby instead of a corpse. The argument flat-out prioritizes punishment over the lives of babies who cannot help themselves.
Colleagues, this issue is not an abstraction. It is not a hypothetical. The situations I have described to you have happened before, and – next year or next month – they will happen again. The life of the next Mattilyn is in your hands at this moment. And she cannot wait for legislators to organize a study committee on whether she will live or die.
What is more important: punishing criminals, or saving babies’ lives? I know my answer, and so do a large, bipartisan group of my cosponsors. Your most dependent, most vulnerable, and most innocent constituents need you. Speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, and join us in protecting them with the immediate passage of this bill.
