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.

It doesn't follow that 12 years is ridiculous. It implies the sentence given to those men is ridiculous.

They need way more than 12 years. Not quite sure how those people got away with it, but a bad precedent is something to emulate by any stretch.

The existence of them both is what is ridiculous. Adult man gets 5yrs for flying into a rage and choking his wife to death. Child gets 12yrs for smothering a newborn baby due to the stress of pregnancy & childbirth in isolation in a family that has told her she is worthless her whole life.

I can find a lot more. There’s the Titfords- 5yrs and 7yrs for slowly torturing their disabled child to death. They took six months to kill her. She died in conditions “unfit for any animal”

Mayo’s conviction for murder and sentence is not justice. She’s being made an example of and it’s wrong. Adults have and are getting far more lenient sentences for worse homicides.

She didn't 'just' smother him, he was also violently assaulted.

Out of interest, what do you think the sentence shouldve been? Some people think it should be less, others think no custodial sentence.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure what I think. More or less time? I don't know. There's an argument for both.

As far as I'm concerned though, a baby was brutally murdered and there has to be a level of punishment involved. The thought of what actually happened in that room is pretty unthinkable

Appeal against sentence and appeal against conviction are both theoretically possible. The former doesn’t seem to have much chance of success to me based on current law and guidelines.

This case sets no precedent. Juries are not bound by the verdicts of other juries. The next case where a mother kills an infant under 12 months will be decided on its own facts, as will the case after that and the case after that.
this sort of I’ll informed hyperbole does no one any favours.

There can be teenage boys with psychosis, just caused by something else.

I don't know what should have happened, sentence wise. She wasn't an otherwise violent person.

I can't wrap my head around a child that young being solely responsible for a newborn, after that trauma.

Then again, the 13yr old that kept her younger sibs including a 1 yr old alive in the jungle after a plane crash and the death of her mother was amazing.

I just can't point at Paris and say 'burn the witch!', which is what the 12 yr sentence and all the name calling feels like to me.

If we monster this child, we feel safer from similar situations. If we have compassion for her, then it could happen to nice people we know or even us.

They can also suffer other trauma. I used to live near to a 12 storey block of flats. A man was threatening to jump, the first police officer to get there was a 19 year old who had been a police officer for a matter of months. He was up there trying to talk this man down and then the man jumped. I wasn't that close and I will never forget the sound of him hitting the ground. The young police officer looked like he was going to collapse when he came down, older officer had gone up just as the man jumped and he nearly carried his colleague down and into an ambulance. I think that 19 year old suffered significant trauma.

I hope he recovered well but it wouldn't be amazing if he had significant depression or PTSD after that.

The father got a longer sentence than the mother didn't he? That has happened in a few cases recently where a child was murdered, the man got a heavier sentence than the mother so I don't think women (or mothers) are always judged more harshly.

I believe the sentences were appealed and increased to 10 and 8 years, still not enough in my view but I wasn't the judge.

Whilst the Jury did not accept that the balance of your mind was disturbed so as to justify a verdict of infanticide, in my judgment you had suffered from a degree of pregnancy denial, a condition that is, at least, recognised in the medical literature.
(My bold).

It was the jury then.

I wonder if the jury was given instructions in the difference between the criteria needed for for a decision that the defendant was suffering from ‘diminished responsibility’ as opposed to the completely different criteria for a decision that the defendant’s crime was ‘Infanticide’?

The jury needed to know and understand the difference. Did they? Did they get more than a few sentences about it?

You can get trial transcripts but I suppose it would be very long.

BMustard · Today 08:18
Out of interest, what do you think the sentence shouldve been? Some people think it should be less, others think no custodial sentence.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure what I think. More or less time? I don't know. There's an argument for both.

As far as I'm concerned though, a baby was brutally murdered and there has to be a level of punishment involved. The thought of what actually happened in that room is pretty unthinkable

The jury could have decided on ‘Infanticide’ which does cover the brutal killing of a baby up to one year old.

In the crime ‘Infanticide’ the mother would not have to have the same mental state descriptions of someone with ‘diminished responsibility’.

As to ‘pre-meditation’ the judge puts this ‘at least 23 minutes’. For someone who has experienced labour, time is not real anyway.

At least he recognised the prosecutions version of pre-meditation did not make sense. The judge seems to see it as a sort of last minute pre-meditation.

The father got a longer sentence because the mother plead guilty and he pled not guilty. Pleading guilty automatically reduces the sentence.

It does set a precedent, of the type that lower courts set in a common law system which is a persuasive precedent rather than a binding precedent you’d get from say the highest court in the justice system. According to the principle of stare decisis, similar facts/circumstances should result in similar convictions and sentences.

The next case won’t be decided on the facts alone, but also on the precedent set by the cases that have come before it- this one included.

So in this case she'd have got less than 12 years if she pled guilty? I wonder how much they would have knocked off the sentence.

He [the judge] said the mitigating features included the lack of support for her, and he flagged up the reaction the case would attract in the press and social media and the reception she would get both in detention and when she was released. “This will be a life sentence to you in every sense,” he said.

Am I right in thinking that if she had been tried at 15 her anonymity would have been protected?

Whilst the Jury did not accept that the balance of your mind was disturbed so as to justify a verdict of infanticide, in my judgment you had suffered from a degree of pregnancy denial, a condition that is, at least, recognised in the medical literature

The judge made those comments about mitigating factors that allowed him to reduce her sentence (that she had had a degree of pregnancy denial at least early on). He did not imply the jury were wrong. He said that, along with other comments, to explain the length of sentence he was passing.

Sorry, I forgot the link:
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/26/teenager-murdered-newborn-son-herefordshire-jailed-paris-mayo

^I find as a fact that almost as soon as Stanley was born, you had decided you could not allow him to live and you assaulted him about the head. Precisely how you did that is not clear. Given the symmetrical nature of the fractures to the parietal bones on each side of his skull, I suspect that you crushed his head, probably beneath your foot.
I am sure that you did that with such force that you thought it had killed him. It certainly caused him serious damage to his skull and to his brain.
But, as it happened, that assault did not kill Stanley. He remained alive and continued to breathe for at least an hour.
In my view, it is highly likely that Stanley was still alive when your brother returned home at 10.30pm that night and when you called out to him not to come into the sitting room.
You did not want him to find you with your badly injured newborn son.
Faced with a birth you had sought to hide and a child you did not want, and whom you had tried unsuccessfully to kill, you decided you had to finish Stanley off.
You did so by stuffing cotton wool balls down his throat. There were five balls in all and they were pushed down so far as to damage the oesophagus.
The uppermost one filled his mouth, pushing his tongue back to the roof of his mouth.
Stanley died from asphyxiation together with the consequences of the head injury^

The baby wasn’t just smothered. He was violently and systematically dispatched over a period of approximately two hours. Those are the judge’s comments above.

I would like to see a transcript of the trial to see if the jury had been instructed in and understood the basis for a verdict of ‘infanticide’ and what mental conditions need to be present for that,

as opposed to looking for signs she fitted the criteria for ‘diminished responsibility’ in order to be let off the charge of ‘murder’.

Both Infanticide and Murder are crimes.
Both mean a deliberate killing.

It wasn't for the Bulger killers, or did that come out afterwards?

Me too.

Iwasafool · Today 12:06
It wasn't for the Bulger killers, or did that come out afterwards?

It wasn’t but it should have been by rights as they were children ( they were 10 when they committed the murder). I haven’t got the link at the moment but just read it the other day. They were put through a court system in a form they shouldn’t have been. They were so small they had to be put on tall stools.

She was offered a conviction for infanticide if she pled guilty. So not only would the sentence have been shorter, she would not have been convicted of murder.

Re:
Infanticide and Murder/Diminished responsibility.

Infanticide versus diminished responsibility

Some feel the law surrounding infanticide should be abolished with the defence of diminished responsibility applying to this situation also. This has however, been rejected by both the Law Commission and the government as it is felt that in certain situations a mother who has killed her baby after giving birth in a clandestine environment – often very young mothers – would be unable to successfully plead diminished responsibility where the burden of proof rests with the defendant.

Written by:Nicola Laver LLB Nicola is a dual qualified journalist and non-practising solicitor. She is a legal journalist, editor and author with more than 20 years' experience writing about the law.