A judge yesterday sentenced the Brooklyn mom who murdered her toddler in 1979 – and hid the mummified body for two decades – to 15 years in prison, virtually guaranteeing the woman “will not walk out of prison,” the jurist said.
Madeline Carmichael, who appeared in court in a wheelchair, has been diagnosed with an advanced, terminal form of bone marrow cancer. A court-appointed doctor says it will kill her in less than three years.
Acknowledging that the case was the most difficult she’d ever presided over, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Anne Feldman rejected prosecutor Barry Schreiber’s request for a maximum term of 25 years to life in prison for Carmichael’s second-degree murder conviction.
She berated Schreiber for “grandstanding,” saying, “I don’t think the maximum sentence will do anything more than make a headline.”
In 1979, Carmichael and her teenage son, Gregory, beat 3-year old Latanisha Carmichael to death and then hid the body in a footlocker stored in a closet with incense and mothballs.
An older sister, Sabrina, witnessed the murder, but kept silent for nearly two decades because, she testified in the harrowing trial, she feared a similar fate herself. The child’s twin, Andre, was too young to understand what had happened.
Gregory Carmichael, who was also sentenced yesterday for convictions on criminally negligent homicide and hindering prosecution, told Feldman that he and his mother hid the body – after accidentally killing the child – for fear that child-welfare workers would send him and his siblings to foster homes.
He said he loves his mother so much that, had he not been arrested, he would have kept the haunting secret of Latanisha’s murder “to my dying day.”
Outside court, Andre Carmichael, 24 – who tipped investigators to the body’s whereabouts last year after his sister Sabrina finally broke down and confessed to him what she’d seen back in 1979 – said he forgives his mother and older brother.
“If God can forgive them, I can forgive them,” he said.