A Paarl woman who confessed to murdering her six-month-old baby had her life sentence reduced by the Western Cape High Court this week after the court upheld her appeal against her sentence.
On appeal, the woman was sentenced to 12 years.
The high court emphasised that the mother was the primary caregiver of her six-year-old daughter at the time of incarceration and that the Paarl Regional Court erred - through deep moral revulsion for the appellant and her conduct, and the need to punish her above all else - when it did not call for pre-sentence reports and turned a blind eye to the best interests of the minor child.
According to court records, the woman pleaded guilty to the murder charge she faced and confessed to murdering her baby on May 7, 2022, when the baby girl was crying inconsolably.
The incident occurred after the baby was hospitalised for a week owing to malnutrition.
It was the mother’s version that she took a bottle cap and placed it over the child’s mouth and nose until the crying stopped.
State argues 'dolus directus' opposed to 'dolus eventualis'
The State rejected the woman’s guilty plea as it contested the form of intent relied upon by the mother in her plea statement, i.e. dolus eventualis (foresight of possibility for a harmful consequence).
The State contended and sought to prove during the course of the trial, that the mother had acted with dolus directus (direct intent to bring about the material elements of a crime) instead.
During the trial, it emerged from one of the State witnesses (an uncle of the mother) that she tried to implicate her four-year-old daughter for the death of the baby when she reported the matter to them just after 4am.
According to the record, the family called the police and an ambulance to attend to the baby who was not breathing, however, the ambulance did not take the baby when they noticed a ring on the child’s face.
It was the mother’s version to medical personnel that she had gone to the toilet in the early hours of that morning and left the baby with her four-year-old daughter, O, and when she came back, she noticed that the baby was not breathing.
High Court Judge Ncumisa Mayosi said: “The crime of infanticide or filicide admitted by the appellant is abhorrent, and the needs of society demand that she be punished and that such punishment be sufficient to deter others, and thereby ultimately protect potential victims. It is also important that punishment should fit the criminal as well as the crime, be fair to society and be blended with a measure of mercy according to the circumstances.”
Lower court should have sought deeper understanding
Mayosi added: “There is an aspect of the triad however to which the learned magistrate paid insufficient or no regard during sentence. And that is the offender and, coupled with that, the nature of the crime she had committed. It is fair to say that no parent wakes up on any given day and proceeds to murder their vulnerable defenceless six-month-old baby. The circumstances of this case, therefore, called for the magistrate to seek a deeper understanding of the factors that drive a parent to this unfortunate path, in general, but also the circumstances that led to this particular accused to do so.”
Mayosi, who emphasised that “murder of any sort is horrendous”, quoted from a body of work by Associate Professor Amanda Spies.
An excerpt from Spies’s work titled Judging Gender: The Sentencing of South African Mothers who Murder their Children, reads: “Women who murder their children are not only judged for their infraction but also for their compliance/deviation from the stereotypical role of motherhood. Motherhood is interpreted through a specific set of socio-cultural norms, with mothers needing to be loving, warm, selfless, and protective at all times. The expectations of motherhood encompass not just being a mother but also being a ‘good mother’ placing the wellbeing of children before ‘everything, anything and anyone else’.
“The ‘motherhood mandate’ is further rooted in class, race, and gender ideals with a ‘good’ mother seen as white, middle-class, married, heterosexual, and able-bodied with the exclusive responsibility of mothering their biological children….filicidal women who transgress this mandate without any apparent justification, such as mental instability, are viewed as doubly deviant not only in breaking the law but, also transgressing ‘their own female nature and their primary social identity as a mother’ – the bad mother. The narrative that emerges in criminal trials is that ‘bad’ filicidal women are demoted from their status of mother and effectively woman, to a monster lacking in humanity.”