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AROUND THE WORLD

More Information on Cleveland Kidnapping Case; Jodi Arias Asks for Death Penalty; Interview with Dr. Tracey Marks; Boehner Calls for White House to Declassify Benghazi Emails; A Look at CNN Film, "Girl Rising"; Prince Harry to Visit the United States

Aired May 9, 2013 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN ANCHOR: We're following two big stories making news AROUND THE WORLD this hour.

There are new details that are now emerging from this nightmare that happened to these women in Cleveland.

MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR: Yeah, we're learning more about the horrifying ordeal of those three women held captive for a decade.

And, also, the man accused of kidnapping and raping them, well, he's appeared in court.

MALVEAUX: The other big story, Jodi Arias, preferring death to life in prison. That in Phoenix.

Jurors are beginning to determine her fate today. Yesterday, they found her guilty of first-degree murder for killing her ex-boyfriend.

HOLMES: Yeah, prosecutors are pushing for the death penalty in this case for Jodi Arias.

In just a few hours from now, and we were discussing this earlier, there's going to be what they call the aggravation phase of her trial.

MALVEAUX: That is when, the prosecution, they're going to try to prove that Travis Alexander's murder was cruel, heinous or depraved and warrants the death sentence for the sentence.

And the same jurors who convicted her of first-degree murder, they're going to decide what her fate is.

Arias shockingly came out in an interview just shortly after yesterday's verdict making it clear that she wants death.

HOLMES: Yeah, it's chilling to listen to. Let's listen to some of that interview with the Phoenix station KSAZ.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JODI ARIAS, CONVICTED MURDERER: The worst outcome for me would be natural life. I would much rather die sooner than later. Longevity runs in my family and I don't want to spend the rest of my natural life in one place.

You know, I'm pretty healthy, I don't smoke and I would probably live a long time. So that's not something I'm looking forward to.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Well, those shocking statements followed what has been, of course, one of the most salacious trials that you could ever imagine.

MALVEAUX: Yeah, we've been watching, evidence included, as you know, graphic sex tapes, photos, gruesome images of the victim in all this and really got a lot of people watching, paying attention, even obsessed with all of this and we want to make some sense of that as well.

HOLMES: Yeah. We've got Dr. Tracey Marks joining us. There she is.

She's a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist based right here in Atlanta.

Talk to us about what we just heard from Jodi Arias and why she would rather want the death penalty rather than life.

What goes through somebody's mind to put them in that position?

DR. TRACEY MARKS, FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIST: Well, two things come to my mind. First is, that's not really what she wants. This is another card she's playing.

She doesn't want the death penalty, but because so many people hate her and she probably knows that, if she says that's what she wants, then maybe they won't give it to her. That's one possibility, which is probably, I think, the greater possibility.

The other is that -- you know, I'm a forensic psychiatrist. I've seen lots of inmates, defendants, and some people just would rather not be in prison for the rest of their lives just because of the conditions, et cetera.

So they'd rather just be taken out and have the easy out.

HOLMES: An easy way out.

MARKS: An easy way out.

MALVEAUX: But you don't think that she really is being sincere. You think that she's just kind of playing people.

Because she fought mightily to save her life, right, when she was in that trial, whether she was lying or saying whatever, right?

MARKS: Right. She lied mightily to save her life and I think this is one more fight to save her life. HOLMES: Yeah. I'm curious about something that we saw. We saw the people outside after the video, cheering. It was, I think, a huge crowd of people.

Can you talk to the mentality of those who have watched this as some sort of reality show and all go tearing out of their houses down to the court to stand outside and applaud like it's a performance.

MALVEAUX: And it was a lottery, too, just to get in at times, too.

HOLMES: Yes.

MARKS: Yeah, unbelievable. Well, you know, this thing has been streamed live for three or four months or so, and I think, you know, at that intensity and exposure, it really -- you can really become overinvested in it on a couple of levels -- one, just feeling very familiar with all of the players and feeling like you know them at this point, watching them every day.

But then also, it's just the fact that being invested in justice and seeing justice prevail and not feeling like you can lie your way out of things.

MALVEAUX: You know, I don't know if people were so involved in the justice aspect of this as in the salacious details.

Do you think that the bar -- have they now raised the bar for what is interesting and entertaining for people to watch?

I mean, all of the details about their sex life, all of the tapes, and really the detail about the grisly murder that took place.

HOLMES: I saw it described in one article as "murder porn," you know?

MARKS: That's a great description.

I do think the bar has been raised now. This is the ultimate reality show for us.

You can't just -- no one created this. This was real life, which makes it even more titillating.

So I think that's what drew people in so much, all of these details and the gruesomeness of it.

HOLMES: It's extraordinary stuff.

Are you -- when you look at her and you see her performance on the stand, you've watched the trial and all the rest, what do you make of her?

MARKS: I don't know. How much time do we have?

You know, my general sense is that she's very calculated and manipulative and more -- and closer to a psychopath than someone with a real mental disorder for which you should excuse her behavior. MALVEAUX: Yeah. It was just so fascinating. I mean, I think the interest will continue.

HOLMES: Yeah.

MARKS: I think it will, too, just for her to even be capable of such a thing.

HOLMES: Yeah. Dr. Tracey Marks, thanks so much. Appreciate you coming in.

MALVEAUX: Yeah, thank you.

MARKS: Thank you.

MALVEAUX: Amanda Berry is home now. She's actually home now with her daughter after nearly a decade of captivity.

The father, of course, as you know, the accused kidnapper. We're going to tell you the chilling details of Berry's delivery. That's up, next.

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HOLMES: Well, they were held prisoner for a decade, those three young women who escaped captivity in Ohio this week. They lived through a nightmare.

MALVEAUX: And more details on the house of horrors emerging.

We learned that one of these women, Michele Knight, delivered Amanda Berry's daughter. This was in a plastic kiddy pool.

At one point, the baby even stopped bringing.

I want to bring in our senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen to talk about this.

It really sounds like this was very bare bones, very basic here, these two women here in a very stressful, stressful situation.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Oh, absolutely. You can't even imagine what you would do in that situation.

But what's incredible and what this brings to light is that, before there were doctors and midwives, women delivered each other's babies.

And so that's what this woman was forced to do without any training whatsoever is she was forced to deliver the baby.

Again, still even, in some parts of the world, that's the way it works when you don't have medical professionals available.

HOLMES: There was a complication by all accounts in this case, though. COHEN: Yeah, complications may be too strong of a word. I was talking to obstetricians this morning who said, look, babies often stop breathing right after birth.

They -- you know, you just see that they're not breathing well, and so you do a couple of different things. You can kind of jostle them around to stimulate them a little and that'll get them breathing most of the time, or you can give them a mask with some oxygen.

What's interesting, and I'm going to quote here, is that apparently, according to the police, when she stopped breathing, Michele breathed into her mouth and breathed for her.

So apparently Michele put her mouth over the baby's mouth and breathed oxygen for her. And an obstetrician I was talking to said, you know, that's really smart, right? That's what we do in the hospital. We put a mask over the baby.

She didn't have a mask. She put her mouth over the baby. So she may have given oxygen that way. That might have worked.

The baby might have had a plug of mucus in its breathing tube and she sort of forced that mucus out.

We don't know exactly what happened, but maybe her inst instincts told her what to do. You know, you see someone not breathing, you give them mouth-to-mouth.

MALVEAUX: You know, in this day and age, when you talk about prenatal care and how important all this is, how is it possible that a man -- this young woman who didn't go to the hospital, didn't have any -- from what we understand, any medical care before or after, manage to be OK and be a healthy person, if we know that she's healthy after all this happened.

COHEN: Right. The human species has managed to continue and develop without prenatal care, right? I mean, we didn't always have prenatal care. Some parts of the world they still don't have it and the species goes on. Women have babies. Those babies are healthy.

Here's the sort of exception to that. If there had been a complication, if something terrible had happened, if this baby had been breach, if the mom had preeclampsia, for example, Michele couldn't have done anything.

So when things go well in pregnancy and childbirth, they go really well and, really, in many ways, you don't need medical intervention.

When they go badly, they go really badly and a layperson would be powerless really to do anything.

HOLMES: Right.

COHEN: And, in this case, thank God, things went relatively smoothly. There was the little glitch where the baby stopped breathing. She breathed into her mouth and she was fine. But basically, it sounds like things went pretty smoothly. You know, thank goodness, this was an uncomplicated pregnancy and birth from what we know.

HOLMES: Amazing. Elizabeth, always good to see you. Elizabeth Cohen there.

MALVEAUX: Appreciate it.

HOLMES: House Speaker John Boehner wants President Obama to release e-mails the speaker says will show what the administration knew about the deadly attacks in Benghazi.

MALVEAUX: We're going to have the latest on this widening controversy, up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: Today, after the House hearing on the deadly attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans at the diplomatic outpost, House Speaker John Boehner called on the White House to release specific e- mails from the days after those September attacks.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BOEHNER, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: We learned that on September 12th, the day after the attacks and four days before Susan Rice's TV appearances, a senior State Department official e-mailed her superiors to relay that the Libyan ambassador -- she had told the Libyan ambassador that the attack was conducted by Islamic terrorists.

The State Department would not allow our committees to keep copies of this e-mail when it was reviewed. And I would call on the president to order the State Department to release this e-mail so that the American people can see it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: All right. Gloria Borger joins us now.

Gloria, Boehner's call shows just how this hearing hasn't really done anything to quell the controversy, and, in fact, sort of takes forward the claims that this is so political now.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. It is political. And the hearings really weren't designed to quell the controversy; they were designed to kind of stir it up, right? And they did exactly that.

I mean, you heard for hours yesterday, almost six hours, from a 22- year veteran foreign service officer from the State Department, describing in stark and emotional and riveting ways in which he felt kind of abandoned by the infrastructure of the United States government the night of the attack.

And in the aftermath of the attack, says that he also felt kind of a distinct coldness from his superiors when he questioned their descriptions of what had actually occurred at the consulate.

So you have this idea, which the State Department has already acknowledged, by the way, that they were -- had mismanaged what had occurred there.

And the question is whether that mismanagement, in the aftermath of this attack, actually then became a cover-up, which is what the Republicans are alleging and which is what House Speaker Boehner says he wants to get to the bottom of.

And by the way, there are now some Republicans, just minutes ago, who are calling for a select committee now to investigate just what did occur at Benghazi and in the aftermath of Benghazi (inaudible) --

(CROSSTALK)

MALVEAUX: So --

BORGER: -- we haven't seen the end of this.

MALVEAUX: -- in light of that, Gloria, a couple things here.

Did we learn anything new, new details about what happened the day of the attack?

And do we also expect to see perhaps subpoenaed or called to testify the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or the former Ambassador Susan Rice?

BORGER: Well, first of all, I know of no plans to call either one of them at this point. We have already heard from Hillary Clinton. And what I think the committee is trying to do, what I'm told, is work this story sort of from the outside in, to try and figure out what happened along the line.

What we did learn new yesterday are really new details from somebody who was on the ground, and the desperation that he felt, kind of being left alone there without what he wanted, which was air support.

When you talk to people in the administration, they will say to you, A, there was no way they could have gotten the air support there that he might have wanted and, B, that the air support wasn't prepared and, in fact, could have only inflamed a situation that was already inflamed.

But from his point of view, you heard him talk about how alone and desperate the people on the ground felt, and how he felt when he got the phone call, which he said was the worst moment of his life, hearing that Ambassador Stevens had died.

And so you really heard the story from a different point of view yesterday, from somebody who was a credible witness to events.

MALVEAUX: All right. Gloria, thank you.

I misspoke; she's still the current U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. She would be disappointed.

(CROSSTALK)

HOLMES: Talk about politics, all right.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES (voice-over): Listen, abuse, forced marriages, slavery: they all stop girls from getting an education in a certain part of the world.

MALVEAUX (voice-over): We're going to tell you how one girl in Sierra Leone uses the radio to push now for women's rights.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HOLMES: It is hard to believe that in 2013 you've got millions of girls around the world struggling just to get an education. We're tackling this issue ahead of next month's airing of the CNN film, which is called "GIRL RISING".

MALVEAUX: We start in Sierra Leone; that is where a civil war left an entire generation, uneducated girls like Sara, they're finding their future in school. And voice, their voices actually on the radio. Our CNN's Fredricka Whitfield has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARA: My name is Sara. I love reading. And I love writing stories.

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Sara is a natural storyteller, but the young woman with the Tinker Bell backpack doesn't write fairy tales.

SARA: They opened the school at the village and the girl wanted to go to the school, but her parents said only the boys are supposed to go.

WHITFIELD (voice-over): It's the story of war-torn Sierra Leone, where poverty, forced marriage and violence have kept many women from getting an education, women like her mother.

SARA: She can't read and she can't write. But I can read and I can write. So I think that makes a big difference between me and her.

WHITFIELD (voice-over): Sara went to live with her aunt, who's a teacher, so she could go to school.

SARA: She's educated and she wants me to be like her.

WHITFIELD (voice-over): She's part of a project called Girls Making Media.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is going to be my year (ph).

WHITFIELD (voice-over): Sara is speaking up because she wants a different ending for herself and other girls.

SARA: I report on the change of this communication I guess girls (ph) in Sierra Leone.

If you do that through the radio, I think people who are deep in the village will hear something about it.

My dream is for me to become a superstar of Sierra Leone.

MALVEAUX (voice-over): Good for her, yes?

HOLMES: Yes. That's great.

Sara's now in secondary school by the way. She wants to go to college and become a lawyer.

MALVEAUX (voice-over): CNN Films "Girl Rising" premieres Sunday; that is June 16th, at 9:00 Eastern.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: Welcome back to AROUND THE WORLD.

Today in Pakistan, gunmen kidnapped the son of a former prime minister just days before the election. His secretary and guard were also shot dead in this attack.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Yes, dramatic stuff. Since April the Al Qaeda-linked Pakistani Taliban have killed more than 100 people in attacks on election candidates and rallies. There's been bombs and bullets and grenades, the Taliban also threatening suicide bombs on polling day, which is this Saturday.

They're saying, quote, "We do not accept the system of infidels, which is called democracy".

MALVEAUX (voice-over): And believe it or not take a look at this picture. This person is actually alive. This is an x-ray -- this is a woman in Brazil, shot through the mouth with a fishing harpoon. I am not kidding, the spear lodging in her spine, barely missing her arteries and spinal cord.

Here's the hard-to-believe part, doctors say that after they remove it, she's going to be just fine. The woman's husband accidentally shot her with the harpoon.

HOLMES (voice-over): That was a classic. The husband apparently said he was cleaning it. The old "I was cleaning it and it went off." Yes.

Prince Harry, he is flying into Washington in a couple hours for a week-long tour of the U.S. First stop is Capitol Hill.

MALVEAUX (voice-over): He's going to meet with Senator John McCain. The two are going to tour an exhibit by a group that clears land mines and other dangerous war debris. It is the same charity that Princess Diana, Harry's mother, of course, was involved in. And afterwards the prince, he is going to join the first lady and Jill Biden for some military family events as well.

HARLOW (voice-over): Yes, you'll recall, of course, last time Prince Harry was here, there were those, ooh, naughty photos, risque stuff, romping around naked in a Las Vegas hotel suite. And that of course, oh, yes, of course, that was going to hit the press.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Las Vegas, though, not on the tour list this time around.

MALVEAUX: Oh, no, keep it clean.

HOLMES: I still love the harpoon. "I was cleaning it and it went off." Yes.

MALVEAUX: Oh, it could be an accident.

HOLMES: It could have been.

MALVEAUX: Come on.

HOLMES: All right. That will do it for us. Thanks for watching AROUND THE WORLD.

MALVEAUX: "CNN NEWSROOM" with Wolf Blitzer starts right now.

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