Teenager guilty of murder.

[placemats]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/23/teenager-guilty-baby-herefordshire-hide-pregnancy-paris-mayo

Apart from the fact that she was raped, if consent to sex is to be a legal term, I find the prosecutions allegations appalling.

'But the prosecution alleged Mayo must have known she was pregnant but chose to deliberately conceal it because she was always planning to kill the baby.'

Perhaps Mayo didn't get early abortion help she needed. I know of one woman, who had 3 previous children, who didn't realise she was pregnant, thought it was early menopause until 4 weeks before her due date. However to allege she was always planning to kill the baby is a step too far. It intimates that those in authority know this child's mind.

"She did murder her baby. She's been found guilty of murder"
@AllOfThemWitches I didn't say otherwise.
I have never said she did not kill her baby.

I don't think anyone has.

I do wonder whether her memory of what happened is wrong due to trauma- as PPs have pointed out she was statistically at a high risk for that.
It would explain her refusal to plead guilty to infanticide, if that option was available.

I know little about legal process. I know a bit more about trauma and the stress of a concealed pregnancy.

Anyway I don't feel as though anyone is learning anything from this thread. No one wants to consider any other perspective than their own. I'm not being persuaded that the 14/15yr old pregnant girl was wholly responsible for her actions in that awful situation by those convinced that she most certainly was.

No one wants to consider any other perspective than their own.

I'm not being persuaded that the 14/15yr old pregnant girl was wholly responsible for her actions in that awful situation by those convinced that she most certainly was.

Nobody's being persuaded, that's one thing we can all agree on. These two sentences are a bit ironic though...

Not really. A wry observation perhaps.

I don't find the narrative of 'evil 15 yr old who freely chose to kill her baby despite having other alternatives' compelling.

You don't find 'traumatised 15yr old child with no support through pregnancy or birth is not the same as a cold blooded killer' particularly compelling.

None of us are open to persuasion.

Mystifying!

12 years.
Remind me again what that bloke who strangled his wife at the start of lockdown got.

I could find no record of her informing the boy she thought was the father. On the contrary, I have found most media reports on the trial say that she was in denial regarding being pregnant.

This is truly awful.
I hope she can appeal her sentence. It does no one any good locking her away for twelve years. She needs help and support. Men seem to walk away scot free from a variety of heinous crimes, they also routinely murder their families in cowardly murder-suicides. No boy will ever give birth alone in their parents’ front room. I do think women (and in this case, a girl) are held to a different standard. Shame on the legal system in this case.

12 years is more than I was expecting but the crime was abhorrent, a custodial sentence is needed.

If there is reason to appeal, then it'll happen. It seems that both judge and jury are in agreement here, so I'm willing to bet there's compelling evidence.

Whatever other people have gotten away with is completely irrelevant, really. It just means that they beat the system and should have gotten more. We can't run a legal system based on 'well he a completely different crime and only served 5 years, it's not fair'

I'm glad she got 12 years. What she did was terrible.

12 yrs is too much. Adults who neglect their children to death get half that.

Either she was unfortunate enough to get a deluded jury who ‘thought she looked hard’ (wtaf!) and just randomly found her guilty of murder, and, coincidentally, an ‘unfair’ judge who gave her too long a sentence - or the evidence was compelling that was a liar, knew she was pregnant, and pre-meditatively and violently assaulted a defenceless newborn over a period of two hours in order to kill him, motivated by hate/rage.

I think it’s the latter. Whatever her anger (that the alleged father wouldn’t support her, that she’d be tied down by a baby, that her mother was shockingly looking after her terminally ill husband) nothing justifies her taking it out on a tiny infant whose brief time in this world was filled with pain and fear. It’s disgusting, and well belong infanticide.

Belong=beyond

I don’t agree with your two prejudicially written possibilities.

The same judge gave exactly the same sentence to Ellie Gould’s murderer.
No similar mitigating circumstances like being a child and giving birth alone. The mind boggles.
I am not saying the child here did no wrong, I am saying the punishment seems unduly harsh considering she was a child who had just endured the most frightening experience. I’ve given birth twice with no medication- but as an adult with family support and hospital staff around me. I cannot fathom her mental state dealing with all of that alone. The (male) judge could have taken all of that into account but he chose not to.

We are obviously not going to agree. In the meantime a young woman languishes in prison for years and to what end?

She put her foot on a newborns head and suffocated him as he cried, before apparently "kissing him and gently placing him in a plastic bag".

Jail is the right place. There might be things going on with the dad, but you can't kill an infant and expect no legal repercussions.

The bottom line is, support should have been sought elsewhere, and baby Stanley should have been relinquished.

However vulnerable his mother was, he was the most vulnerable of all. A baby's life isn't disposable, it has value like anyone else's.

The purpose would be punishment, and hopefully rehabilitation at the same time through mental health support.

Truly, I don't think the judge being male had anything to do with it. Jury was mixed sex. Most people are aghast at a child being killed. From what we've seen in the news, the police also found her behaviour odd (saying she hates the newborn cry).

Or the bloke who dug his ex wife’s grave before taking a hammer round to her house and bashing her face in with it when dropping the kids back home. Who got off with manslaughter instead of murder.

I think back to the case of the 19 year old in Brighton who went partying and left the baby to die. People were falling over themselves, saying she must have had finished responsibility because no sane person would do that.

People even claimed she was being held against her will, after videos came out of her partying!

Shamina Begum, same things. There were a few women who terminated at 40+ weeks because of paternity issues, same. Any case of a child killed by the mother, same.

Sometimes people do bad things and that includes women and girls.

@placemats https://exploringyourmind.com/science-says-girls-brains-mature-faster-than-boys-brains/

Childish insults for anyone who doesnt wholeheartedly agree with you makes you sound like an immature child.

Well we've been told several times on here that she did. I can't find it either but I quoted the BBC report that she told a boy she wrongly thought was the father and he didn't want to know.

As punishment for killing an innocent baby.

She was a child herself though, having just given birth. It’s traumatic at the best of times. This was the worst of times.
I don’t like hearing babies crying but I hope a jury wouldn’t use that to convict me of a crime.

As I said, we will have to agree to differ, and no one has been able to explain what good 12 years in prison is going to do anyone. Unless you think reams of other children are going to fall pregnant and kill their babies, and that this will deter them. What children who fall pregnant need is support and empathy, not the threat of a long prison sentence should such horror ever happen again.

No girl in Britain needs to give birth alone in their parents' front room.

Shame on anyone who brutally kills a baby.

BTW I do think it mattered the judge is male. No man could ever truly comprehend the reality of labour and childbirth, it is both surreal and primeval as well as being unimaginably painful to the extent that I thought I had been literally ripped in two from within. Whiz is kind of what happens. I dread to think how it affected a child on their own who will not have had ante natal care which tries valiantly to prepare us adults for it. Though nothing can.

“No girl in Britain needs to give birth alone in their parents' front room.”

I completely agree.
So one wonders what drove her to such a desperate position.

The more I think about this more questions I have.
If she did manage to conceal a term pregnancy, how did she conceal the birth. Even if she managed complete silence (I find this unlikely) how did she manage the inevitable mess. To such an extent no one knew anything until his poor body was found.

How did her family not know she'd had him?