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The cult expert who helped the courts take away an Attleboro religious sect member's children is now trying to keep her out of prison.
"I don't see any contradiction whatsoever in recommending that her children be removed and going to bat for her," the Rev. Robert T. Pardon said yesterday. Pardon, of the New England Institute of Religious Research in Lakeville, investigated the insular sect and wrote a report that guided Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth P. Nasif when the judge decided to terminate the parental rights of sect members.
Pardon said that the same mind control exerted by the sect on Karen E. Robidoux, 26, that made her unfit to be a mother also reduces the level of her responsibility in the 1999 starvation death of her year-old son, Samuel.
"It's because she was under undue influence she needed to have her children taken away," said Pardon. "It was obvious she could not be a competent parent if she remained within that group."
That "undue influence" is cited by Robidoux's lawyer, Joseph F. Krowski, of Brockton, in court papers outlining the strategy he will use to defend her against a charge of second-degree murder.
In 1999, another sect member, G. Michelle Mingo, told the group she had received a vision from God. In order to atone for vanity about her personal appearance, Robidoux was to stop feeding Samuel solid food and only breastfeed him, Mingo told the group. By that time, though, Robidoux was pregnant again and unable to produce enough milk to sustain the boy. He died after 51 days.
"This was a consequence of group-think," said Pardon. "You see this all the time in these kind of high-control groups. The group develops a life of its own, and the individual is basically powerless. Any human being, if they were involved in this kind of environment, could be induced to do things they would never do on the outside."
Pardon concedes it will be a challenge to persuade jurors Robidoux truly was powerless, and that her defense of blaming mind control by the sect -- a thought reform environment, as Pardon terms it -- is not an attempt to dodge justice.
"The general public doesn't generally understand a thought reform environment," said Pardon. "The jury's going to have to be educated. This is by no means a crackpot scheme. This is a real legitimate defense."
Pardon said one way jurors can become educated about what Robidoux faced is if sect members' journals are introduced into evidence. Police, under a search warrant, seized thousands of pages of handwritten journals during a 1999 search of the sect's duplex at 196-198 Knight Ave.
"These journals make it clear Karen wanted to feed her baby," said Pardon, who reviewed the journals as part of his work with the family court.
He cited as an example a journal entry in which Robidoux says God pointed her to a Bible verse saying, "Pray for the children faint with hunger." Pardon said Robidoux interpreted this as meaning she should do something for her son. But sect members intervened, according to Pardon, saying, "No, no, no, this is Satan that's talking to you."
"Karen at one time was crying, wanting to feed her baby," said Pardon. After the boy died, "Karen was pounding her fists on the wall crying because she had wanted to do something about it."
But, because of the mind control exerted by the sect, Robidoux was powerless to feed her son or take him and leave, just as many battered women are powerless to leave their abusers.
"There is a particular phenomenon that occurs where a victim feels responsible for their own victimization," said Pardon. "People can be coerced to stay in an environment that ultimately is very hazardous to them and their offspring. This was not the case of some criminal crackhead because she was too strung out on drugs and was too out of it to care for her child."
Pardon said the same forces that would make a mother follow a religious prophecy even as she saw her child wasting away are at play in everyday life, though in much less sinister contexts.
As an example, even without rules or laws governing clothing styles, most members of any given society dress similarly. "We all wear uniforms to a certain extent," said Pardon. "We are always conforming to the culture in which we live in."
Allowing a baby to starve rather than buck a group's rules is obviously a more extreme form, but not the most extreme. Members of some cults have committed suicide at the urging of the groups' leaders.
Pardon said Robidoux's mind-control defense is the only logical explanation for why she let Samuel die. "If we don't accept a thought reform defense or battered woman defense, then why did she do this?"
As to what the court should do about Robidoux, Pardon was less than certain. "Justice needs to be done by all means," he said. "With Jacques, I was more ready to say this guy needs to go to jail." Robidoux's husband, Jacques Robidoux, 29, was convicted in June of first-degree murder and automatically sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
But Pardon could not say what sentence would be appropriate for Karen Robidoux. "I certainly think that second-degree murder is way out of line."