Ariel Courtland Found Guilty of Assault and Battery Last Week

[XLFD]

The prosecutor's office of Mason County won a conviction concerning a local celebrity on January 22, 2016 for a violent act, but this is likely the first time you've heard of it.  One would think that the local news media would be abuzz with the release of this information, but it is nowhere to be found in the local newspaper in the three editions since, nowhere in the Mason County Press, and nowhere in the other media from around the state and country who reported on the trial that made her famous back in 2012, eight months after her infant child went missing.

Those who have followed this case in depth have probably came to know it as a "she said, he didn't say" situation from the first trial.  Her baby daddy, Sean Phillips, was charged with the crime of unlawful imprisonment after he was alleged by this mother, Ariel Courtland, to have taken the kid without her permission.  According to Sean Phillip's interrogation on that same day, lasting about a half hour before he invoked his Miranda rights, he did not have the baby that day.

The authorities decided to believe words, even though some of the words began to contradict themselves, over silence, and Sean was jailed, tried for the crime, and convicted, still silent.  In prison, Ariel cajoled him to write a confession letter which even the prosecution has noted was contrived.

The record shows that the only evidence up to that point that Sean had left with the baby that afternoon was Ariel's testimony.  Others had seen Phillips shortly after he left, none noticed a baby.  A neighbor of Ariel's testimony totally contradicted both of her versions of events.  Her mother claimed Ariel took the baby, known as Baby Kate in popular media, from her house on Staffon the previous night, and that was the last time anybody on record had seen the baby.  Roughly fourteen hours existed between when Phillips came to town and that previous night; yet, the investigation never tried to track Ariel's whereabouts during that time using cell phone forensics.  This is according to the FBI and MSP agents who testified in the trial who were experts in that field.

So there is a significant amount of people that still consider Ariel Courtland a person of interest in this incident, particularly since she has changed her stories over time in formal hearings, and in order to believe her version of events we must trust her explicitly.  This becomes hard for some when recent events has her lying to police officers as noted here about an incident where she had a violent outburst against one of her newest baby daddy's friend:  Ariel Courtland Assault Arrest Report Filled with Fibs. 

Punctuating this was last week's trial, held rather covertly on Friday and not covered by the media, even though it should have been.  Judge Peter Wadel found her guilty of assault and battery on Jeremy Foreman and was ordered to pay $795 to the court (or 80 hours of community service work) and given 93 days in discretionary jail time, according to court records uncovered this afternoon.  Prosecuted by the same team that is going after Sean Phillips now for open murder in front of the same judge who will try it.

Ariel has been labelled by some for not acting like a mother who has just lost her baby, her boss testified that before the disappearance "Ariel said that her newest child was causing problems... she wished Kate would die."   Now we have her showing propensities for violence, being held to task for it, but she is still the only real witness the prosecution actually has in the pending trial whose testimony means anything.  Isn't it time to wonder why they, and our media that try to out-scoop each other on court news, are keeping her assault and battery conviction under the radar?