USA: two attachment-therapy practitioners convicted of reckless child abuse resulting in death of Candace Newmaker

Proceedings

1. 2001-06-18 · jury verdict and sentence

   Jefferson County District Court, Golden, Colorado, USA. Connell Watkins and Julie Ponder were convicted of reckless child abuse resulting in death for the April 2000 death of 10-year-old Candace Newmaker during a 70-minute 'rebirthing' attachment-therapy session in which she was wrapped in a blanket and restrained by the two convicted therapists and two co-therapists, and asphyxiated. Both were sentenced to 16 years' imprisonment, the statutory minimum for the offense. The case prompted 'Candace's Law' in Colorado and a similar statute in North Carolina, criminalizing dangerous rebirthing re-enactments as a therapeutic technique.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• a 70-minute 'rebirthing' procedure in which the child was wrapped tightly in a flannel blanket meant to represent a womb and told to fight her way out while four adults pushed on her body with their hands and feet
• total physical restraint of a 10-year-old inside a residential therapeutic intensive her adoptive mother had paid roughly $7,000 for, with no ability for the child to stop the procedure or be heard when she said she could not breathe
• the framing of suffocation and physical crushing as a legitimate clinical treatment for reactive attachment disorder