Now she wants sympathy.
In a cowardly plea for special treatment, accused child-slaughterer Yoselyn Ortega begged a judge to bar the press from her hospital bed arraignment today — claiming through her lawyer that she’s too visibly sick, too “pathetic” to be seen.
“It is a pathetic woman who lies here,” public assistance defense lawyer, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, told a Manhattan judge as Ortega lay at her side, handcuffed to her bed at New York-Presbyterian hospital.
“My client does not wish to have the press in here,” the lawyer said, in asking unsuccessfully for Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lewis Bart Stone to bar a reporter from watching as Ortega
pleaded not guilty to the bathtub slashing deaths of two young Upper West Side children under her care.
Lucia and Leo Krim perished in the brutal, Oct. 25 slashing. The girl was 6 years old; the boy was 2.
They were found bleeding to death in the bathtub of their W. 75th Street apartment by their mother, Marina Krim, upon her returning home with the third child, Nessie, 3. Ortega was still in the apartment, and had slashed her own self in the throat, authorities said.
“She’s lying in a hospital bed. She has a neck brace, and her hand that you can see is shaking,” the lawyer argued today.
“She is in a very debilitated condition. She has tubes running out of her torso. She has a right to privacy.”
The lawyer added, “You have a profoundly injured, severely injured individual… you are chilling her right to be free from being observed in this condition.”
In allowing the proceeding to be covered, the judge said he recognized that sometimes “there are things that become uncomfortable with respect to the press.” He added, “That is the cost that we must bear in connection with the civil liberties.”
The judge ordered Ortega to undergo a psychiatric exam to determine if she is mentally fit to proceed, and kept her on suicide watch.
Ortega appeared alert but did not speak at the ten-minute proceeding, during which she lay under a white blanket, her hair in a blue hair net. Her lawyer entered a not guilty plea on her behalf.
The purpose of the hearing was to formally inform Ortega that she’s been hit with the top homicide charge in the books — murder in the first degree, reserved for slayings of judges and cops, serial killings, killings deemed cruel and wanton, or, as in Ortega’s case, in which there were multiple victims.
The nanny had been suffering mental and financial difficulties, and told cops that she resented the Krim family for asking her to do an extra five hours a week of housework.
The judge set Jan. 16 as her next court date.
With AP