By Dr. Sinclair Grey III Anyone who decides to adopt is making a huge difference in the life of a child. With so many children in the system waiting to be adopted, parents who wish to take on this responsibility have a huge challenge awaiting them. Let’s face it – there’s always a challenge in adopting. However, that challenge is magnified in many ways when the adopted child is of a different ethnicity than the adopted parents. An American couple, Matthew and Grace Huang have been found guilty by a judge in Qatar for the death of their 8-year-old adoptive daughter. The case has drawn scrutiny from American legal experts and the Obama administration. But the public, particularly people of color, are wondering, “did they really do this?” Matthew Huang told reporters, ‘we have just been wrongfully convicted and we feel as if we are being kidnapped by the Qatar judicial system. This verdict is wrong and appears to be nothing more than an effort to save face.’ The judge, in making his decision, didn’t specify the charges. As a matter of fact, he only read a few sentences. As you can imagine, there’s plenty of confusion. This quote came from TheBlaze, a conservative website run by former Fox News host Glenn Beck. He and others feel that the trial is a sham, but it’s difficult to know if Beck has the credibility to make such a claim himself: “The devout Christian couple was accused by prosecutors in the Middle Eastern country of starving their adopted daughter to death in January of 2013 in order to sell her body parts, but a leading U.S. legal advocacy group the California Innocence Project which took on their case has maintained that the couple is innocent and that the entire case was based on faulty science and misunderstandings by Qatar over interracial adoptions and homeschooling.” The 8-year-old girl in question was adopted from a Ghana orphanage. The Huang’s claim that the child suffered from a childhood eating disorder. Before the trial, the Huang’s spent a year in jail. This case is far from over. Questions about the legal proceedings, the autopsy, and other points of evidence will continue to be discussed. Editor’s notes about this case: In addition to the time spent in jail, the Huangs are saying that evidence was fabricated in the autopsy and that they were fined several thousand dollars. But prosecutors are saying that the parents deliberately starved their daughter and refused to take her to the hospital when she was dying. The parents claim that the daughter died unexpectedly. The State Department has expressed concerns about the way the Qatari police interpreted the decision of an Asian couple from the US adopting African children. They felt that there was no reason for such an adoption to take place and became suspicious of the family’s motivations for doing so. They also thought it was odd that the couple was homeschooling their children, which is not common in Qatari culture. “We have been concerned by indications that not all of the evidence was being weighed by the court and that cultural misunderstandings may have been leading to an unfair trial. We have at a senior level raised this case with the Government of Qatar on multiple occasions,” deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said at her Wednesday briefing.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 04:35:19 +0000
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