The Irish Times carries a tragic story this morning:
“A 34-year old woman who caused the death of her eight-week old son and attempted to murder her two-year-old wept today as she was handed a 10-year sentence.
The woman, who cannot be named due to a reporting restriction, stabbed both children in their family home on July 27th, 2021.
Due to the time she has already served in custody, the woman is due to be released imminently and will then begin the five-year period on licence.
The defendant was initially charged with murdering her son and attempting to murder her daughter.
She denied the charges and, following a trial in 2023, was convicted of both offences and handed a 20-year sentence.
These convictions were overturned by the court of appeal and she was due to be retried on both charges.
After being examined at length by medics, a consultant forensic psychiatrist concluded the woman was suffering from an abnormality arising from a depressive episode.”
There’s more at the link. It’s an extraordinary story, and – compared with the weeks and weeks of Lindsay Clancy obsession – an extraordinarily under-covered one. It happened right here, on our own little island.
A few things in the story stand out.
First, unlike Clancy, this woman was actually convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years. The Crown Court of Appeal in Belfast then overturned that, and decided to have her assessed by the shrinks, who essentially found her crazy.
Second, unlike Clancy, this woman is now, essentially, free, just five years after stabbing her newborn son to death with a kitchen knife, and trying to do the same to her other child.
Third, this bit is particularly chilling:
“Three days later, the woman wrote a series of diary entries. She said her partner had left to be with another woman, and did not care for her or the children, and that she had chosen to take their lives so no one would mock them any more. The entries also included expressions of love for her partner and a reference to waiting in heaven for him.
The judge said that later that evening, the defendant had “armed herself with kitchen knives and attacked both children”.
Following this, she called her partner - who was by then in England - telling him she loved him and that she had just killed their baby son.”
The partner, by the way, is now dead. Though no information is provided on what killed him. Whatever it was, I would imagine that phone call did not help him live longer.
The diary entries make perfectly clear that this woman’s crime was pre-meditated. She thought it out. She planned it. That her thinking was irrational is obvious – but so is the calculating nature of her actions. Consider the fact that she did not call the partner to say she was going to kill her son but waited until after the fact: She did not want to be stopped, and knew she would be. Which tells you, dear reader, that even in her mentally unwell state, she was well enough to know that what she was doing was wrong.
But that’s just my opinion.
In any case, the point is that tragedies or horror stories like this one are depressingly common. Neither Lindsay Clancy nor this woman will be the last to do what each of them did. The courts in all jurisdictions tend to take broadly the same view: That the mother must have been out of her mind.
And of course, society needs that to be true. The thought that mothers might calmly, rationally, and cruelly kill their children out of a sense of rational self-interest, or even vengeance, is too frightening to be acknowledged. Better that these women be aberrations – horror stories of mental health gone wrong – than somebody normal.
The other thing here is that we’re not really sure what prison is for, are we? If Prison is designed to protect the public from dangerous people, then is it appropriate in these cases? The general public is not actually likely to be at risk from these women, because they appear to target only their children and do so usually for reasons that are entirely domestic. If on the other hand prison is about rehabilitation, well: You can hardly rehabilitate somebody who has murdered a baby boy in cold blood.
What we do seem to understand in the west – wrongly in my view – is that prison is not simply a punishment. So what the Northern Irish courts have decided to do is to grant this woman, who murdered her newborn and tried to stab her own daughter to death on the same day, freedom after just five years. Supervised freedom, to be sure. But freedom nevertheless.
There are those, some very close to me, who argue for compassion in these cases. I am broadly sympathetic – mainly because I cannot imagine the torture of living with the knowledge of what you have done, assuming that you’ve later snapped out of whatever drove you to do it in the first place.
But I am left with a lingering question: Would the same compassion be shown to women who murdered other people’s children?
Suppose this woman was not the mother, but a mentally disturbed nanny: Would she be out in five years?
If the answer to that question is no – and recent cases suggest that it is, indeed, no – then one wonders why, if you are a child, the value of your stolen life appears to equate to who it was, exactly, who killed you.
JMG