The parents of 10-year-old Emani Moss starved her to death before burning her body, and deserve to die, prosecutors say.
“The facts of this case constitute torture of the victim, and therefore deserves the death penalty,” Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, who is seeking a death sentence for Emani’s father and stepmother, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution exclusively Thursday.
Emani weighed only 32 pounds — the very bottom of the weight percentile for her age — when her charred and emaciated body was found in November in a trash canister outside the Gwinnett apartment where she lived with her father Eman Moss and her stepmother Tiffany Moss.
It was a tragic climax to a pattern of abuse that court records show the state’s child welfare agency had overlooked.
In charging Eman and Tiffany Moss with malice murder, prosecutors said the crime was “outrageously and wantonly vile” enough to justify a death sentence, in accordance with state legal standards.
“Based on the treatment that that child received, we felt like this was a case that warrants the ultimate penalty,” Gwinnett Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney Lisa Jones told the AJC.
Along with murder, Tiffany and Eman Moss face charges for concealing a death, two counts of first-degree child cruelty and two counts of felony murder, or committing a felony that causes a death.
This is the first time that Porter has asked for capital punishment for a married couple.
Finding examples of Georgia couples facing death together for accusations they killed their child, or any parents facing capital murder charges for killing their child for that matter, is difficult. And on the few occasions where death has been sought, a lesser penalty was imposed upon conviction.
The most apt comparison in Georgia would be the case involving 5-year-old Terrell Peterson, tortured and beaten to death in 1998 by relatives serving as foster parents. As in Emani’s case, child protective services had received several reports of abuse but failed to step in and take Terrell from his home.
But prosecutors were unsuccessful in getting the death penalty against the boy’s aunt and grandmother, each of whom were sentenced to life in prison.
This also is not the first time in recent years that parents have been accused of starving a child to death.
Jade Sanders and Lamont Thomas were convicted of murder in 2007 for malnourishing their 6-week-old son Crown Shakur.
A Fulton County Judge sentenced the Atlanta couple, vegans who fed Crown only soy milk and apple juice, to life in prison. And the state Supreme Court upheld the convictions in 2011.
Tiffany Moss had been convicted before on cruelty charges linked to Emani, but officials with the state Division of Family and Children Services didn’t remove Emani from the home.
DFCS records show at least four encounters with the Moss family, reflecting a history that compounded serious questions about the agency after the death of Emani and Eric Forbes, 12, of Paulding County, whom authorities say died in October from severe abuse at the hands of his father Shayaa Yusef Forbes.
The agency had investigated abuse allegations concerning both children prior to their deaths. But both children were allowed to remain in homes with their parents.
Dozens of Georgia children die from maltreatment each year despite intervention by the state’s child protection agency. In 2012 alone, an AJC investigation of DFCS records showed that DFCS workers did not detect or did not act on signs that might have foretold the deaths of at least 25 children.
Authorities weren’t able to determine how long Emani had been dead before her parents allegedly tried to burn her body, or how long she was forced to go without food before she died.
But University of Georgia legal professor Ronald Carlson said prosecutors likely took into consideration how long they could show a jury she may have suffered when they considered a capital sentence.
“(Porter) would not go into it unless he felt his proof was enough to prove ‘outrageously and wantonly vile’ (behavior),” Carlson said. “The agony of a lengthy period of time inflicted on her is definitely going to be a factor in the jury’s mind.”
Since taking office in 1993, Porter has sought capital punishment 12 times, but only five defendants have received the death penalty, he said.
After Emani’s death, her grandmother Robin Moss reflected on the last time she saw the girl she’d raised as her own for five years. The normally jubilant Emani was gaunt and barely recognizable, Robin Moss said.
“I could look into her eyes and see something was wrong,” she said.
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