—
## The Charge, the Law, and the Wait for Resolution
The federal charge against Annugetta Pettway carried substantial exposure. At the time of her January 2011 arrest and charge, the maximum penalty was life in prison, with a mandatory minimum of twenty years. A maximum fine of $250,000, or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense, also applied.
Pettway was fifty years old when she was charged, age forty-nine at the time of arrest. She had spent twenty-three years raising Carlina White as her daughter under a false name. She had given the child no legal identity. She had watched the girl grow up, become a teenager who was asking questions she had no honest answers to, and had told that teenager a story about drug-addicted mothers and abandonment rather than the truth.
The case moved through the federal system over the following year. The indictment came in February 2011.
On February 10, 2012, Annugetta Pettway appeared in Manhattan federal court and pleaded guilty.
In open court, she said: “I went to the hospital. I took a child. It was wrong.”
She offered no further explanation for her actions in her plea statement. The defense, at various points in the proceedings, described a woman who had experienced depression, grief, and what was characterized as significant mental illness — situating the abduction in the context of her failed pregnancies and a desperate desire for a child. These characterizations were advanced by her lawyers; they were not clinical diagnoses, and the prompt for this article correctly notes that Pettway’s attributed miscarriage history does not establish any diagnosis and cannot serve as an excuse for what she did.