“A Fine Mixture of Pity and Justice:” The Criminal Justice Response to Infanticide in Ireland, 1922–1949

Abstract

MH, a domestic cook who was 26 years of age, was charged with murdering her newborn infant in September 1931. MH had been “seeing a boy” who, she stated, “took advantage” of her on one occasion, procuring her consent to sexual intercourse by a promise of marriage. She claimed that she only realized she was pregnant during the later months of her pregnancy, but did not inform the father of her child. Her employer, suspecting that MH was pregnant, enquired on several occasions whether she could do anything to help, but MH did not admit her “condition.” Although her employer was aware that MH had no family or home to go to, she gave MH notice to quit her job. A couple of weeks later, MH gave birth in her bedroom at her employer's home; she did not call out for assistance or disturb the girl with whom she shared the bedroom. MH admitted in her statement that the baby cried after birth and that she “tied a white dress belt … around its neck to kill it,” adding: “I tied it [the belt] tight. I killed the child and I know I killed it.” Afterwards, MH put the body in a suitcase, cleaned up the bloodstains, and returned to work. The suspicions of her employer eventually lead to the discovery of the dead infant. The postmortem examination showed that the infant had been born alive, but had received no attention at birth; death was the result of strangulation. MH was acquitted of murder at the Central Criminal Court.

The Voices of Violent Women in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

“…Research on violent women in an Irish context has particularly focused on the crime of infanticide. Scholarship by this author, Karen Brennan, James Kelly, Dympna McLoughlin and Cliona Rattigan has pointed to the ways that some women who murdered their children were treated by the criminal justice system (Brennan, 2013;Farrell, 2013;Kelly, 1992Kelly, , 2012Kelly, , 2019McLoughlin, 2002;Rattigan, 2012). Despite clear evidence in some cases that infants were violently and deliberately killed rather than passively allowed to die, women accused of infant murder, from the mid-nineteenth century at least, typically elicited sympathy.…”

Criminalising Neonaticide: Reflections on Law and Practice in England and Wales

“…1 and 2). Although the statute extends to victims aged under 12 months, when it was originally enacted in 1922 it was primarily focused on facilitating lenient treatment of women who killed their babies at birth due a reluctance to convict her of murder and condemn her to death (Davies, 1937(Davies, , 1938Brennan, 2013a).…”

‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000

“…3 These narratives invariably stress that the woman on trial was of previous "good character" and driven to the crime by events and 2 Because of the separate legal systems of Scotland and Ireland, and after 1922, of Northern Ireland, this chapter focuses specifically on the context of infanticide cases and their representation in England and Wales, rather than attempting a "four nations" approach to its treatment within the United Kingdom. To the best of my knowledge there is regrettably no study at present dedicated entirely to infanticide in Northern Ireland, but there are valuable discussions of infanticide cases in Scotland (Abrams 2002;Kilday 2021: 31-35 and 46-55;Marks and Kumar 1996;Siddons 2014) and Ireland (Brennan 2013(Brennan , 2018a(Brennan , 2018bFarrell 2013;Rattigan 2012) during the period covered here. 3 It should be noted that infanticide emphatically being singled out as a "special case" set aside from expected categories is not limited to the professions of law and medicine, or the press and judicial system, but can appear in potentially surprising forms.…”