Two Jamestown men will go to prison after pleading guilty to killing infants in a fit of rage within two weeks of each other in April 2024.

Matthew Nuttall, 27, will be sentenced this year after throwing a child into a Pack-and-Play portable crib because he was frustrated the baby wouldn’t stop crying. The child’s spinal cord was severed, which caused the child’s death. In December, Sean Thomas pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter just before his jury trial was scheduled to begin after admitting to causing the death of eight-month-old Aniyah Turk. Thomas intentionally strangled and shook Aniyah, causing catastrophic and unrecoverable injuries requiring her hospitalization on life support until she eventually succumbed to her injuries weeks later.

First, give Jamestown police and District Attorney Jason Schmidt credit for securing guilty pleas in the cases. The pleas are for the most serious charges Nuttall and Thomas faced, and for the most serious charges the law allows.

“Each horrific and heart-wrenching. Each senseless and completely avoidable. Each offensive to us as a society whose principle value is to protect the weak, the vulnerable and the innocent,” Schmidt said when announcing Nuttall’s guilty plea. “These are the cases which keep all of us up at night for days without end. They scream out for justice. Securing convictions against those who are criminally responsible and punishing those persons to the fullest extent of the law is the only way forward …”

Schmidt sums up the revolting nature of these cases when he talks about our society’s guiding principles to protect the weak, the vulnerable and the innocent. Adults have the ability and opportunity to fight back, to remove themselves from situations or to call for help. Infants and young children do not. Their lives are literally in the hands of adults. But, for some reason the law treats taking the life of an adult is treated the same way as taking the life of a child. State law isn’t protecting the weak, vulnerable and innocent. Manslaughter laws are written to take into account actions taken during a time of extreme emotional disturbance as a mitigating factor in the commission of a crime. There are instances where manslaughter charges make sense. We’re not convinced the death of defenseless infants are among those instances.

Two years ago, Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara, D-Schenectady, proposed legislation that would upgrade manslaughter crimes that result in the death of a child to class A-1 felonies after a 5-year-old girl in his district died from starvation. Santabarbara couldn’t believe the case wasn’t a Class A felony due to its heinous nature. It’s the way many here felt in the wake of the deaths of Isaac Benton and Aniyah Turk.

Santabarbara’s bill didn’t move out of committee in 2024 or 2025. It was reintroduced in 2026 as A.3573. In our opinion it should be law. Passing A.3573 would be a statement that New York state recognizes the acute violation of trust that happens when a child dies at the hands of the adults trusted to care for that child. For two years, state lawmakers have passed thousands of bills which they have given higher priority than legislation that would provide a harsher punishment for those who snuff out the life of children. Our state faces serious issues, but we still can’t imagine a priority more important than protecting, or more properly punishing, those who take a child’s life.