'Chicken coop' case a horrific account of abuse

Even against a 24-hour media backdrop of epic-scale evils like terror attacks or senseless and apparently random mass murders, something nominally smaller and closer like the Taylor County child abuse saga still has the power to shock and sicken us. Thank God.

The trial and sentencing that concluded earlier this week put a name and a face on what seemed to be an almost casual descent into depravity in the treatment of a child. That name and face belong to Diana Franklin, whom Superior Court Judge Bobby Peters sentenced to 190 years in prison on 27 separate charges including aggravated assault, child cruelty and false imprisonment.

Even Peters, as well as Taylor County Sheriff Jeff Watson and Assistant DA Wayne Jernigan -- all of whom have no doubt dealt with some appalling things in their respective careers -- seem to have been caught off guard by Franklin's stunning insistence on trying to justify her "disciplinary" treatment of an adopted daughter she confined in an outhouse, in a chicken coop, and tied by the neck to a tree. She beat the naked child with a belt buckle and put a remote-control shock collar on her. Social workers acting on an anonymous tip found the child padlocked in a garage in May 2012.

After all, Franklin said in court, parents aren't so very different from corrections officers, and she cited policies from the jail handbook as "a healthy parent-child relationship." She reproached Watson for not being "more like Andy Griffith."

Nobody was buying it -- nobody with a say in Franklin's fate, anyway. Peters told her, "You'll actually get better treatment in prison than you gave your own daughter." Jernigan noted that if a peace officer treated jail inmates in the same "healthy" way Franklin treated her daughter, he or she would be fired and charged.

At no point did Franklin express or appear to show the slightest remorse. In fact, the only expression of remorse came from Watson, who said the legal system had failed in its responsibility to protect the girl: "I feel like we let her down: Nobody called; nobody came. She sat out there night after night, crying for help."

(Sentiments like those come from something called a conscience.)

Franklin might have sealed her own fate by keeping a journal that detailed her treatment of the girl, to whom she sometimes referred as her "slave." ("The narcissism of this woman," noted ADA Jernigan, "knows no bounds.")

Georgia Bureau of Investigation child abuse specialist Leigh Brooks testified that "This was the worst case of abuse that I've ever investigated in which the child survived."

There's no Andy Griffith story here; this child wasn't locked in a chicken coop and beaten naked in Mayberry.

We wish Diana Franklin a long, healthy life, so she can serve as much of this sentence as possible.

This story was originally published December 9, 2015 at 5:40 PM with the headline "'Chicken coop' case a horrific account of abuse."