Readers captivated by the final chapters in our The Unforgiven: The Untold Story of One Woman’s Search for Love and Justice may find themselves drawn to another real-life legal drama with a strikingly similar theme that’s been unfolding on the front pages of Britain’s newspapers.
At the heart of both stories lies the same devastating question: fitness to be a parent.
In The Unforgiven, we recounted the case of a young mother convicted of child endangerment in Illinois following the tragic drowning deaths of her three children. After serving about four years behind bars, she got married and tried to rebuild her life. But when a doctor identified her as the woman involved in the drowning case, state authorities removed custody of her three “new” children, restricting her visits to supervised encounters.
A somewhat parallel case became sensational news in England. There, the daughter of an aristocrat began a life with a convicted sex offender. They had four children—all of them taken away by the courts after a protracted legal battle.
When the woman became pregnant again, she and her partner tried to conceal the birth, fearing the state would claim their fifth child, too. They went on the run, living in a tent. Just several weeks old, the baby died, possibly of hypothermia, perhaps because of suffocation as her mother slept beside her.
The mother claimed that fear of the child protection system—a system she called structurally unjust—caused them to panic and led to their daughter’s death.
In a contentious four-month trial that ended last month, the pair was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter.
In a powerful essay in the London Review of Books this month, Clair Wills writes that the prosecution’s language was “freighted with accusations of moral failure and generalized wickedness” and that assumptions about bad character are enjoying a revival in English and American ideas of criminal responsibility.
“We like to think that defendants are punished for what they have done, or attempted to do, “ she writes, “not for who or what they are.”
The couple will be sentenced Sept. 15. The maximum sentence is life imprisonment.