Former officer gets probation after manslaughter charge dismissed in Alabama

ProPublica identified more than 40 pregnant women arrested in Houston County since 2009

Robert Maddox Jr. appeared before a judge in a Houston County courtroom on May 18, 2026. His wife, Brittany Maddox, traveled to Alabama for the hearing, as she had for every hearing in the case, even though she still feared being in the same room with him. The judge sentenced Robert to five years’ probation and fined him about $3,000, which he could pay off at $50 a month, and ordered him to complete anger management classes through the court referral office.

The manslaughter charge was dismissed as part of a plea deal. Robert pleaded guilty to domestic violence, and the prosecution recommended that the manslaughter count be dismissed. The indictment had alleged that Robert “recklessly” caused the death of Brittany’s fetus by “punching her in the stomach with a closed fist,” a charge carrying a maximum of 20 years in prison. When the judge moved to dismiss the most serious charge, he did not say the word manslaughter or mention the miscarriage. Brittany said she tried to ask questions about the deal, but she was not sworn in, and the judge quickly moved on.

The judge described the case on the record: “The victim and the defendant were in a verbal dispute whereas the defendant was alleged to throw the victim down and choke her,” he said. “The state alleges that this occurred in front of their minor children as well.” The judge went on to say that the presence of the children might have increased Robert’s punishment to a minimum six months’ imprisonment, but because he was a first-time offender, that minimum did not apply.

The case began on the night of Feb. 15, 2022, when Robert, a rookie officer who had started at the Headland Police Department about four months earlier, called a colleague in a panic. His wife was about three months pregnant and bleeding heavily, and they needed someone to watch their two sleeping children while they went to the hospital. Headland police Officer James “Bo” Knight arrived with his wife. Knight had been serving as a mentor of sorts to Robert and had urged him to reach out if he ever needed help.

Robert had something in a plastic bag that looked to Knight like fetal remains. Brittany stood by silently. Robert said he would be back as soon as possible, that he was taking both his wife and the bag to the hospital. When the couple returned three hours later, Robert was holding a white container. “They put my fucking baby in a box,” he said.

Investigators soon began building a case that it was Robert who caused the miscarriage. About six weeks after she lost the pregnancy, Brittany reported her husband for assault. She first went to an abuse-prevention organization, which connected her to the police and helped her get a protective order from the court. She provided a Houston County judge with a description of how Robert choked and beat her in front of their 1- and 2-year-old children just before the miscarriage, along with pictures taken starting the following week of marks on her neck. She also turned over text messages in which Robert promised not to hurt her again and begged her to consider how his imprisonment would hurt their family. “Being honest is going to get us both screwed,” he wrote. “The truth is going to give me locked up.”

Knight gave a sworn statement to investigators in Dothan, the nearby city where the young couple rented an apartment, recounting that weeks after the incident Robert had confided in him that he had hit Brittany in the stomach, choked her and pushed her to the ground. “I asked him how many times he has done this,” Knight said in his statement. “He stated many.” According to the statement, Knight asked when he had last hurt her, and Robert responded, “the night before you kept my kids.”

Brittany said she worried the other officers would side with her husband, but she reached out on social media to several of them anyway. She said Robert went into her account and deleted the messages she had sent, but it was too late. Knight, one of the officers she messaged, confronted Robert, who admitted that he had hit Brittany in the stomach before the miscarriage, the officer later told the Dothan police. Robert furiously messaged Brittany: “If you want me to go to jail keep accusing me of it,” he wrote. “Just know I love you and it will never happen again but I think I’m getting fired.”

Robert was charged with murder and released on bond about five weeks after his arrest. He never again saw the inside of a jail or prison cell. Brittany Maddox believed the case against her husband was a straightforward one and felt there was solid evidence that the abuse caused her miscarriage, but the effort proved harder than she anticipated. A few months after his arrest, a grand jury declined to indict him for murder and instead returned a manslaughter indictment. He lost his job with the Headland police because of his wife’s claims of abuse and started washing cars again.

Goodman, who took office in January 2023, told ProPublica that the evidence against Robert was inconclusive and that he would not have been able to prove at trial that Robert committed manslaughter. “There was never any evidence that tied the actions of the defendant to the death of the baby,” he said, adding that “no expert could tie a causal connection.” Goodman also said he explained to Brittany that “we would not have moved forward on the manslaughter case” had he been in office when his predecessor chose to seek an indictment, and said, “It pained me as a prosecutor that I was not to be able to seek justice in this case.”

Robert declined an interview but wrote in an email, “I was made out to be someone I wasn’t.” He did not respond when pressed to elaborate. After ProPublica sent him a detailed list of the allegations, he replied, “That is not what happened.” In response to a follow-up email, he said his wife had no bruising or marks at the hospital: “If I was abusive and abused her then took her to the hospital they would have saw the marks and not let me leave with her.”

Brittany said the dismissal came too late to spare her years of preparation. “The charge being dropped four years after he was arrested as part of a plea deal makes no sense to me,” she said. “That wrecked me in a lot of ways, more than the times I laid in bed for days after he hurt me.”

Alabama has gone further than almost every other state to embrace fetal personhood, the legal concept that embryos and fetuses deserve the same rights and protections as children, and people charged in the state with harming a fetus face especially lengthy prison sentences. In Houston County, which sits in the corner of the state near the borders of Florida and Georgia, the defendants in dozens of those prosecutions were pregnant women. They were charged not for actually harming their unborn babies but for potentially endangering them — not by violence but by using drugs. In all but one of those cases, which date back nearly two decades, their babies survived. Some of the women spent months in jail and even went to prison.

ProPublica identified more than 40 pregnant women arrested in Houston County since 2009 on chemical endangerment charges after testing positive for drugs. The women were prosecuted under Alabama’s chemical endangerment law, which makes it illegal to expose children to drugs. The 2006 law initially was designed to address the dangers of home-based meth labs, but prosecutors almost immediately began using it against pregnant women. An analysis of court data found that the county prosecuted women for chemical endangerment at one of the highest rates in the state, though the data does not specify whether the cases involved pregnancies.

Cases against pregnant women who use drugs come to light almost automatically, and there is little opportunity to challenge them, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Hospitals frequently administer drug tests to pregnant women and notify child protective services of positive results, and those agencies often turn that information over to police in Alabama, where drug use is not grounds just for a child welfare investigation but for a felony charge. Ziegler said laws do not provide an easy path for punishing abusers of pregnant women, especially when the baby survives. “The versions of personhood that are enshrined in our laws have tended to focus on the conduct of women,” she said.

Among the cases ProPublica reviewed: Xaviera Smith, a former nurse and mother of three from Tennessee, said she knew she would be arrested before she gave birth in Houston County to her youngest son in 2018. She had been battling a meth addiction for years and could not deny the results of the drug test administered while she was in labor. Smith said her baby was born healthy and did not need to go to the neonatal intensive care unit for drug withdrawal. A court-appointed attorney negotiated a deal on her chemical endangerment charge; she was sentenced to 10 years but could avoid prison by serving time through the local work-release program. “I just went to court and took what they gave me,” Smith said. “There’s nothing I really could do.” After violating the terms of work release, she ended up in prison for nearly a year.

A 24-year-old whose newborn tested positive for methadone and marijuana received a five-year prison sentence in 2009. Another woman, who had been convicted for exposing her fetus to THC in 2013, had her probation revoked for possessing synthetic marijuana and spent about nine months in prison. Another woman who also tested positive at the hospital where she gave birth ended up in jail for four months in 2024, and said many fellow inmates were women who had been arrested for using drugs while pregnant.

A woman who was about seven months’ pregnant was arrested in Houston County the very same day as Robert Maddox, in 2022. She was briefly jailed for violating probation stemming from a past chemical endangerment conviction. She then faced additional felony charges when, weeks later, she tested positive for cocaine at the hospital where she gave birth. She later received a five-year sentence and wound up at Tutwiler Prison for Women, with a release date right before Christmas in 2028.

Courtney Haney grew up in Dothan but left at age 18 to join a high-pressure sales crew that traveled across the country, selling boxes of frozen meat door-to-door. Several of her colleagues used drugs, but Haney became pregnant unexpectedly and stayed clean. Her daughter was born healthy, exactly on her due date, but the baby’s father split and took the child. Haney remained in Denver to look for her daughter, had no family or friends there, turned to drugs and became homeless, eventually losing custody. Almost a year later she found out she was pregnant again and returned to Dothan in 2020 with a full-blown addiction to heroin. She went to the hospital with contractions the week before she gave birth and knew she would test positive for drugs. She said no one offered her options for drug treatment even after she asked for help, and hospital staff stabilized and discharged her. She kept using until she returned to give birth, when she was drug-tested again.

“I was holding my daughter in my hands and the police walked in,” Haney said. Police questioned her, and she hoped they might show mercy and allow her to go home with her child. After they told her she might be charged with a felony for exposing her fetus to drugs, she burst into tears. “I answered honestly, thinking that if I’ve answered honestly they wouldn’t press charges,” she said. “And that was pointless.” She was arrested on a chemical endangerment charge three months later. She had no felony convictions, but a sentencing report recommended against straight probation because of charges in other states that had been dismissed. The district attorney’s office offered a plea deal for a lesser charge and just over a year of probation. Haney did not complete court-ordered drug treatment and failed to report to her probation officer several times, and was jailed for a total of four months. “Whenever I went to jail, that’s where I met most of them,” Haney said. “There’s a whole lot of them in Houston County.”

Many of the other women jailed with Haney had been arrested on chemical endangerment charges as a result of failing drug tests during childbirth. Haney became pregnant two more times while she was addicted; for her third child she traveled to nearby Georgia to give birth, and then to Florida for her fourth. Neither state arrests women for prenatal drug use at the same high rate as Alabama. Unlike many other counties, Houston County does not offer a drug court program that lets defendants get substance-abuse treatment instead of prison time and avoid a felony on their record.

For women struggling with addiction during pregnancy, a chemical endangerment arrest can initiate a cycle of court fees, imprisonment on probation violations and even additional charges, and separation from their newborns and other children can drive them deeper into addiction.

Goodman said his office has recommended addiction treatment as part of sentences for these women, and that some were rearrested and imprisoned for violating probation or never completing the treatment offered by the court. “During my term it is rare that we would sentence a defendant in these types of cases to a straight prison sentence,” Goodman said, “unless of course there were other extenuating circumstances, such as prior criminal history.” Pat Jones, who was Houston County’s district attorney at the time of these cases, did not respond to a request for comment.

Lourdes Rivera, president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, said her organization has identified 2,298 cases of women arrested since 2006 on charges related to their pregnancy. Most of those were for drug use and are concentrated in Oklahoma, South Carolina and Alabama. Rivera said the numbers of women prosecuted for pregnancy loss appear to be on the rise compared with the years before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion. “Law enforcement is using laws that were never intended to apply to pregnancy to investigate, arrest and punish women,” Rivera said. “And it’s only getting worse.”

Cases against abusers accused of causing pregnancy loss are harder to bring, Ziegler said. ProPublica reported that such cases can be tricky to prove, often requiring evidence that the abuser intentionally struck the victim in the stomach and testimony from a forensic pathologist linking the violence to the pregnancy loss. It is easier and more common to pursue charges against defendants accused of killing both a pregnant woman and her fetus. In one unusual turn, a grand jury in a city outside of Birmingham indicted a woman for starting a fight that led to her being shot in the stomach and suffering a miscarriage.

Domestic abuse is a leading killer of pregnant women, and for every fatal case there are an estimated 70 nonfatal ones. Researchers have found that almost 13% of women surveyed experienced domestic violence during pregnancy. Nonfatal cases usually go unreported, according to Maeve Wallace, an expert on domestic violence at the University of Arizona. The same goes for miscarriages, which often happen at home and may leave no medical record, which can make it difficult to determine how often abuse causes miscarriage, she said.

Brittany said her relationship with Robert had been turbulent from the start. She was still in high school when they started dating and uprooted her life to relocate to his hometown of Dothan. She said he started physically hurting her months into the relationship and that it escalated after the move. Brittany found herself isolated in Alabama, where life revolved almost entirely around her husband, two young children and the couple’s car-detailing business. “Robert would also hurt me if things weren’t done perfectly or if any issues happened,” Brittany wrote. Unlike many other victims of domestic violence, she hounded the police and prosecutors to take her case seriously after the miscarriage.

Brittany said Robert’s promise not to hurt her again after the miscarriage lasted about a week. She would later tell a judge that he began hitting and choking her again, and photos from that time show bruising on her neck and eye. “I started hating him when I saw my baby dead,” she wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions. She said it took her several weeks to come forward because she had to work through complicated feelings about the loss of both her pregnancy and a husband she still loved, and because she was not sure if she and her daughters could safely leave him.

About a week before she went to the authorities, she got a text from Robert asking if she would give him one more chance. “I can’t give you your baby back,” he wrote. “That’s something I’m always going to live with knowing I did that.” Asked about the text, Robert wrote to ProPublica, “I was referring to having to pull my kid out a toilet I couldn’t believe I had to do that. It was painful emotionally.”

As Robert waited for his day in court, he asked the judge to relax some of the conditions of his bond. He had lost his job with the Headland police and had started washing cars again, and he wanted the court to remove the ankle monitor so he could more easily travel to work in Florida, near Dothan. From her home out of state, Brittany had been calling the district attorney’s office once or twice a month to keep track of her estranged husband’s whereabouts. She said she was shocked to learn of his out-of-state travel request not from prosecutors but from a news story, and for the first time since his arrest she felt unsafe. A judge denied the motion to remove the ankle monitor but granted the request to commute to north Florida.

Brittany stayed in touch with prosecutors and began to mentally prepare for trial. She said that as months stretched into years, the conversations with them began to shift. They asked her how she felt about a plea deal, and she said she would be open to it as long as the charge related to her miscarriage was not dropped completely. “I told them I could push through a trial emotionally,” Brittany wrote.

Finally, almost four years after Robert was arrested, his attorney brokered a plea deal with prosecutors. He would plead guilty to domestic violence, and the prosecution would recommend the manslaughter charge be dismissed.

On May 18, 2026, Robert appeared before the judge in Houston County. The sentencing felt surprisingly short to Brittany after all the waiting.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 800-799-7233, or by texting “start” to 88788.