American father Joshua Michael Reed of Maryland faces 16 years of imprisonment for  blinding his own 3-month old daughter 

By Edward Era Barbacena 

Another gruesome crime committed by a white American man that resulted  to severe injury  to a harmless and innocent child. Crimes against  innocent  children are becoming  very often and majority of perpetrators are WHITE.

A Frederick County man will serve 16 years in prison for abusing his 3-month-old daughter so badly that she permanently lost her eyesight.

Joshua Michael Reed's punishment, handed down Tuesday by Frederick County Circuit Court Judge William W. Eldridge IV, was a stunning deviation from Virginia's sentencing guidelines, which recommended a prison term of just one year and 11 months.

Reed, 39, of the 300 block of Iroquois Trail in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, was found guilty of three of five felony counts — child abuse by a parent that resulted in injury, child cruelty that resulted in injury and malicious wounding — at the conclusion of a five-day jury trial that began on March 6. However, the 12-member panel, after deliberating for 15 hours over two days, could not reach a decision on the two other charges: Child abuse by a parent that resulted in injury and child cruelty that resulted in injury, both of which stemmed from an incident on Jan. 16, 2021, when the baby was just 15 days old.

Eldridge declared a mistrial on the two counts originating from January 2021, but the Frederick County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office has elected to try Reed again on those felonies and a pretrial hearing in the case is scheduled for June 8.

The three counts for which Reed was convicted in March all originate from the morning of April 25, 2021, when the baby was found to be bruised, blinded and with broken bones.

According to court documents and trial testimony, the baby's mother was working in her home office that morning while Reed, who was her boyfriend and the child's father, watched the 3-month-old alone in the living room of the Frederick County home they were sharing at the time.

The mother testified on March 7 that she ran to the living room when she heard her daughter crying hysterically. By the time she reached the baby, the little girl "was screaming and her eye was swollen underneath. ... It was turning colors."

A short time later, the mother said, the swelling worsened and the baby's left eye became bloodshot. She told Reed they needed to take her to a doctor immediately, but he wanted to wait until that evening when the girl had a previously scheduled appointment with her pediatrician. The mother prevailed and she and Reed took the baby to the MedExpress Urgent Care at 207 Gateway Drive near Winchester, then to Winchester Medical Center's Emergency Department.

When physicians at Winchester Medical Center saw the severity of the baby's eye injury, they transferred the child to Inova Fairfax Medical Campus. In Fairfax, doctors determined the child was permanently blinded due to dislocated lenses and detached retinas in her eyes, and had fractures to her ribs, right tibia (shinbone) and right clavicle (collarbone) that were in various stages of healing.

The baby was transferred to Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C., for further treatment, and the Frederick County Sheriff's Office was notified of a possible case of child abuse.

The mother testified in March that her baby had always been content with her but would cry for long periods of time when she was with Reed. She also said the baby suffered occasional bumps and bruises while with Reed, but the mother accepted her boyfriend's explanations that all the marks on the infant's body were due to simple accidents.

Investigators presented their case against Reed to a Frederick County Circuit Court grand jury on Sept. 9, 2021. The jurors certified the five felony charges and Reed was taken into custody 20 days later. He has been held without bond in the Northwestern Regional Adult Detention Center on Fort Collier Road near Winchester since that time.

Prosecutors first attempted to try Reed in October, but a snafu brought proceedings to an unexpected halt. Three days after the trial began on Oct. 7, jurors got a glimpse of Reed being walked into the Joint Judicial Center while still wearing a jumpsuit issued by the jail. Eldridge declared a mistrial that day, because in Virginia jurors are not allowed to see defendants in shackles or a jail uniform during a trial because it can taint their opinions regarding guilt or innocence.

Once Reed was convicted of the three felony charges in March, he faced a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison.

Eldridge sentenced Reed to 10 years for child abuse by a parent that resulted in injury and five years for child cruelty that resulted in injury. The judge then agreed to dial back the malicious wounding felony to a misdemeanor count of assault and battery, and gave Reed 12 months for that charge.

All of the sentences will run consecutively, not concurrently, Eldridge said, resulting in a total prison term of 16 years.

Following his release, Reed will be placed on supervised probation for three years and must repay $7,109 in court costs, which includes payment to his court-appointed attorney, David Hensley.

As for the little girl, she is now 2 years old and her mother said in March that she is experiencing significant developmental delays but is otherwise healthy.