In Milwaukee, Ray A. Hemphill, preacher at his Faith Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith, will go on trial for the abuse and death of an autistic 8-year-old in an apparent attempted exorcism. Hemphill, however, claims that it was merely a very intense “prayer service.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
[Hemphill] faces a charge of felony child abuse, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and five more on extended supervision, because Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann said he didn't think a homicide charge would stick. In a written report last year, the Milwaukee County medical examiner's office ruled the death a homicide by suffocation "due to external chest compression." McCann said last year that he could not prove Hemphill knew that what he was doing was likely to kill the boy.
Terrance Cottrell is the first child to die because of this sort of religiously-motivated negligence and he won’t be the last. Sometimes religion just seems to warp people’s thinking and prevents them from exercising even the most minimal critical thinking — by that I mean that things are accepted when they occur in a religious context even if they would never be accepted in any other context. There is an implicit bias in favor of religion and religious activity that extends to nothing else. This is very unfortunate and people should learn to become a bit more skeptical and cynical about what religious authority figures tell them.
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