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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5221 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Old enough to vote, old enough to swing. Some cases are easy and, assuming that she was indeed a co-conspirator, the Dutcher case is one of them. I don't see why you are comparing it to an infanticide.

Mothers who kill their children is one of the absolutely classic hard cases - not because it isn't heinous, but because anyone who has been a mother, or even an involved father, bellyfeels that

  • Only a crazy mother would do it
  • A mother going crazy is a "there but for the grace of God" thing, not a "those people are awful" thing.

In England, a separate crime of infanticide (with the same range of sentences as manslaughter) was carved out of murder in 1922 because all murders were capital back then and nobody wanted to hang women for it. It is possibly significant that the law passes just after women got the vote and started serving on juries, but probably not given:

  • There was a single-figure number of women MPs at the time the law passed
  • There was still a super-majority male electorate because the female voting age was set at 30 for the first decade
  • The law had been known to be non-functional since the 1870's. The last woman to actually be hanged for infanticide was Rebecca Smith in 1849 and she poisoned eight children with arsenic (which was seen as a particularly heinous way of killing at the time). Even in the era of all-male juries, prosecutors and judges felt they had to tell the jury that they could assume the death sentence would be commuted in order to get a conviction.

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