2024: PLLDF Calls On US Atty. To Charge Cop With Double Murder, Both Mother And Unborn Child.

The gruesome details of the murder of Sandra Birchmore, allegedly at the hands of a former Stoughton cop who had impregnated her, have some calling for an additional charge for the killing of the unborn baby.

“It is hard to imagine a more clear-cut case for enforcing federal law for protecting unborn children than this one,” Roger Severino, the vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, told the Herald, “when the very existence of the unborn child was the very evidence against this monster.”

Former Stoughton Police Detective Matthew Farwell is accused of murdering 23-year-old Birchmore in her Canton apartment not too long after she had excitedly revealed to him that she was pregnant with their child by texting him a photograph of a handmade card saying, “Congrats, we are going to be parents!”

Farwell, 38, of North Easton, is accused of entering Birchmore’s Canton apartment on Feb. 1, 2021, and strangling her to death as he knew she was weeks pregnant. Prosecutors say he then staged the apartment to make it look like Birchmore had committed suicide.

She was roughly two months pregnant.

By that point, Farwell had known Birchmore for almost 11 years. Birchmore at 12 years old joined the Police Explorers Academy, a youth program run by the SPD for which Farwell taught. Prosecutors say Farwell first groomed the girl and then took her virginity when she was 15.

The married man 12 years Birchmore’s senior, who had three children with his wife, maintained a sexual relationship with the young woman, court documents allege, until her death.

The charges

The feds charged Farwell with killing a victim or witness to a federal crime, as they hung his illicit actions on ripping off his employer for having sexual rendezvous while on the clock.

To some outside observers, there is a missing element in the charges against the allegedly crooked cop: the unborn baby that by all accounts Birchmore was very excited to have. As the pregnancy appears to be the inciting action that led to the murder itself, some could see the unborn as the actual intended victim in the case.

In a press conference last month announcing the indictment, both acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy and a representative of the Boston FBI, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Steve Kelleher, emphasized the unborn baby in their telling of the story.

“Matthew Farwell’s gun and badge did not grant him authority to violate the Constitution and certainly didn’t entitle him to sexually exploit, abuse and rape a child before killing her and her unborn baby in an attempt to cover up his alleged crime,” Kelleher said.

Levy stated the impetus for the alleged crime: “Ms. Birchmore was very excited about becoming a mother: buying baby clothes and other items, taking precautions to ensure the health of her new child. … But Mr. Farwell did not share in that excitement. It’s alleged Mr. Farwell reacted quite negatively to the news that Sandra Birchmore was pregnant with his child and he acted angrily.”

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which is also known as “Laci and Conner’s Law” from the contemporary case of Laci Peterson and her unborn child’s murder at the hands of husband and father Scott Peterson, was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004.

The law, according to the Congressional record summary, “Provides that persons who commit certain Federal violent crimes … and thereby cause the death of, or bodily injury to, a child who is in utero shall be guilty of a separate offense. Requires the punishment for that separate offense to be the same as provided under Federal law for that conduct had that injury or death occurred to the unborn child’s mother.”

Some activists are pushing for this law to be applied to Farwell.

Colbe Mazzarella, an attorney and president of the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund, told the Herald, “I call on Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy to charge Officer Matthew Farwell under 18 U.S.C. Section 1841.”

Mazzarella added: “The accusation that a police officer killed his former student and their unborn baby strikes horror in every feeling heart. Such monumental selfishness was the reason for the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act. This law was passed by Republicans and Democrats to punish and prevent many abusers who kill pregnant women or use violence to force a woman to abort their child.”

The Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group is also pushing for the charge.

“It is plain that there are two victims in this terrible crime, a young woman and her unborn baby. The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act was enacted to ensure justice for both victims in crimes like this,” Autumn Christensen, the group’s vice president of public policy, told the Herald.

“It is even more relevant when the unborn child themselves may have been the ‘evidence’ the accused hoped to dispose of in their crime. The federal prosecutors in this case should seek every opportunity to obtain justice for Sandra and her baby,” she added.

The law has not been particularly popular among more left-leaning legal analysts who have argued that, despite the law’s carve-out to allow for self-determined abortion, its application could endanger a woman’s ability to make her own abortion decisions.

The American Civil Liberties Union, for one, opposed the bill and wrote during its legislative development that it would be the “first federal law to recognize a zygote (fertilized egg), a blastocyst (pre-implantation embryo), an embryo (through week 8 of a pregnancy), or a fetus as an independent ‘victim’ of a crime, with legal rights distinct from the woman who has been harmed.”

The ACLU said it “fully supports efforts to punish acts of violence against women that harm or terminate a wanted pregnancy.” But the bill, the non-profit added, “is an inappropriate method of imposing such punishment, however, because it dangerously seeks to separate the woman from her fetus in the eyes of the law. Such separation is merely the first step toward eroding a woman’s right to determine the fate of her own pregnancy and to direct the course of her own health care.”

In Birchmore’s case, every indication was that she wanted to have her child. In fact, investigators and prosecutors used the apparent excitement for the child’s upcoming birth as key indicators that Birchmore had no intention of committing suicide, as Farwell is alleged to have staged the scene of her death to suggest.

The FBI’s Kelleher said, “Our investigation also uncovered additional evidence that is inconsistent with someone choosing to die by suicide. In the hours leading up to Sandra’s death, she reached out to a photographer to inquire about booking a newborn photo shoot. She also reached out to a friend about obtaining baby clothes.”

Adding the charge

Levy left the door open for additional charges, either from his own office or from the local and state agencies with whom the feds shared their investigative output on the case.

“We’re going to continue to look through this matter and if there’s other individuals that we develop evidence that they’ve violated the federal law, we’ll proceed,” he said at the press conference. He added, “That is our duty to the public, to pursue credible leads like that and investigate them fully.”

A spokeswoman for Levy’s office has since told the Herald, “We don’t comment on charging decisions.” Developments to the charges, if any, will likely be unknown outside of updates to the public docket.

To apply the Unborn Victims of Violence Act to the Farwell case would be both a matter of prosecutorial procedure and act of political will, the Heritage Foundation’s Severino told the Herald.

In a vacuum, prosecutors can take the case back to the grand jury stage, allege the new charge, and return a superseding indictment with the extra charge added, said Severino, who worked for years as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

“It will take political pressure for them to charge what they should have done from the very beginning,” Severino said. “Under the current administration, there isn’t a snowball’s chance that they would support an Unborn Victims of Violence Act charge given their radical pro-abortion policies.”

Politics and justice hang in the balance. Defendants have a right to a speedy trial and too long a delay to that trial, Severino said, could be a violation of Farwell’s due process rights.

“Did not the baby have value?” Tom Harvey, a Massachusetts attorney with the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund, told the Herald. “A bipartisan bill passed by Congress shows that, under the law, that baby’s life had value. And Sandra Birchmore sure seemed to think so. There were two deaths here and the perpetrator should be charged accordingly.”