Infanticide Act

And yet within maybe 60 years of adopting that insanity test, they carved out cases that involved infanticide, mothers killing children under the age of 12 months.

And they created a crime called the Infanticide Act that has a much lower threshold than the standard insanity defense and instead says when a mother kills a child under the age of 12 months and the balance of her mind is disturbed by reasons of childbirth, then she's going to be convicted only of manslaughter and sentenced typically to probation and counseling.

So a very different outcome.

And it's a very efficient way.

And that deals with the juror who is not thinking, has this been proved beyond reasonable doubt? But it's basically somebody who is just rigid in their way of approaching an issue or biased in some way or whatever.

Moving away from majority verdicts to this substantive law, in my researches, I hadn't been aware of the Infanticide Act 1930.

I

did a whole set of these cases when I was, I mean, obviously, there weren't that many of us as women who became senior in the criminal law.

And so I did quite a number of infanticide cases or cases where murder was charged.

And you usually would call those experts to come and explain the whole business of postnatal depression.

You've got to remember that 1938 introduced the Infanticide Act because it was felt that women were being convicted wrongly.

And there was a sort of upsurge of public opinion about that.

I mean, it's sort of a surprising thing.

Over 100 years ago, they passed a law called their Infanticide Act, and when a mother kills a child under the age of 12 months, even though it, it might look like an intentional killing, first-degree murder, she's charged with infanticide.

And the infanticide statute says that the, you know, because the balance of her mind was disturbed by reasons of childbirth or lactation, it's prosecuted as manslaughter, and the presumptive sentence is probation and counseling.

There's no public spectacle.

I read this New York Times article that made me think about how different our legal system is maybe than other people.

So There is an act in the UK called the Infanticide Act of 1938 that recognizes that cases involving mothers who kill infants under the age of one are different from other intentional killings.

And instead of trying those women for murder and judging them under an insanity defense, it allows them to be charged with infanticide and to be punished as if convicted of manslaughter, which would mean the prison sentence would be very rare.

And they instead would be sentenced to probation and counseling.

So he writes, Infanticide laws started as a way of avoiding a conviction for murder when the death penalty was still an available outcome.

The British Parliament introduced an Infanticide Act in 1922.

And then it was replaced in 1938.

Still in force, it allows the jury, and this is in the UK, it allows the jury to convict a woman of infanticide rather than murder or manslaughter.

So here we go, this sparked a debate.

Is that newly born or not? And because of that case, it started some momentum, and they finally got to the Infanticide Act of 1938.

which then designates manslaughter for mothers who kill their kids' robes who are under a year old.

That is still on the books.