The horror of the crime stunned a nation: Three weeks after giving birth to her second child, Brenda Hale, described as a happily married housewife, killed her baby and tried to kill herself.
“I only want to die,” a note police found in her hand read. “Can’t I be quietly put away?”
A major media event at the time, the trial of Hale, of Hertfordshire, England, in July 1936 ended with the jury deciding not to convict the 26-year-old of murder. Critical to the verdict was testimony by an eminent physician that the mother suffered from “puerperal insanity,” mental illness brought on by childbirth, and wasn’t responsible for her actions.
The case led England and Wales to establish statutes that allow courts to treat infanticide differently from other homicides, offering the possibility of leniency to mothers who kill a child during the postpartum period, the first year of the child’s life. Verdicts or pleas under that law almost never lead to prison time; commitment for mental health treatment is common.
Those statutes, still in place today, influenced similar laws in roughly two dozen countries.
In the United States, only Illinois has adopted a law that grants special consideration to mothers suffering from postpartum mental illness who kill their children — but only during sentencing after a guilty finding.
Massachusetts and several other states have considered similar laws. The first-degree murder trial of Lindsay Clancy for killing her three children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months; has revived debate about whether states should adopt some version of the nearly century-old English law.
“The criminal justice system needs to be updated to understand this illness,” said Jessie Colbert, coordinator of the Massachusetts Mind the Gap Coalition, a network working to promote perinatal mental health. “There needs to be some more clarity and more fairness.”
A mother slaying her own children is among the most appalling crimes imaginable, instinctually repugnant. Yet debates about how to ensure fair treatment under the law are nuanced, raising big questions about culpability, mental illness, equity, and stereotypes about women that have persisted for centuries, experts said.
There’s an ancient dichotomy to how these mothers are perceived, experts said. Women who kill their children are often seen as either evil or mad. Public opinion may sort them into one category or the other depending on whether they admit guilt or the way they killed (more “masculine” methods such as stabbing or shooting tend to paint women in a worse light). Personal traits, such as whether they were married or worked outside the home, can also matter, said Julie Wiest, a sociology professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
All those biases or viewpoints may affect how much mercy, or punishment, these women receive.
In Puritan Massachusetts, more than 300 years ago, communities often viewed unmarried women who killed their newborn babies as lewd, cunning, selfish, and callous, said Dartmouth senior lecturer and researcher Clara Lewis.
The current Infanticide Act in England and Wales recognizes that childbirth-related mental illness can extend through the first year after giving birth. It’s both a lesser charging option in homicide cases, or a “partial defense” where infanticide is raised as alternative to murder or manslaughter, said Karen Brennan, an associate professor in law at the University of Essex who has written extensively on infanticide statutes.
It may apply to a woman who can demonstrate she was unable to distinguish right from wrong due to “the effect of giving birth” or “lactation,” a reference to a debunked idea that breastfeeding could cause insanity. That language is generally interpreted now to mean severe postpartum mental illness.
Rather than prison, defendants under this law who have been diagnosed with a condition such as postpartum psychosis may be ordered to a period of commitment at a mental health facility, though not necessarily indefinitely. In some cases, the woman is released to a placement in the community but is not in state custody.
“A lot of academic analysis points to the law here as a much better option,” said Brennan. “It may be very difficult to fit postpartum psychosis into the very narrow insanity requirements.”
Currently, the Infanticide Act is rarely used, and almost always as a defense or in a plea deal. Cases are still adjudicated in court, and English and Welsh prosecutors still usually choose to charge women who kill their babies with murder, Brennan said.
In 17 cases between 2002 and 2024, seven women pleaded guilty to infanticide, and juries returned a verdict of infanticide instead of murder for another two, according to a review of the laws by the Cambridge Pro Bono Project. Seven others were convicted of murder, and one pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Brennan noted that infanticide defenses are less likely to be successful for women who kill their children immediately after childbirth.
Importantly, the Infanticide Act applies only in cases where the victim is less than 1 year old. In Clancy’s case two of her children were older than 1 year, so such a law would not apply in those charges, Brennan said.
Other countries have variations of the same law. In parts of Australia, the period during which a woman could be eligible for leniency is up to two years after a child’s birth. In New Zealand, it’s 10 years.
Lindsay Clancy has claimed an insanity defense, citing postpartum depression and psychosis, a rare and dangerous condition. Postpartum psychosis affects one to two birth mothers out of 1,000 and can cause delusions and hallucinations, and leave them with a poor grasp of reality. Up to 4 percent of those with the most serious form of the condition are estimated to harm their children, according to the Cleveland Clinic. About 5 percent commit suicide.
Dr. Susan Feingold, a Chicago clinical psychologist who advocated for Illinois’s new law, echoed Brennan’s concerns that the unique characteristics of severe postpartum mental illness can defy how criminal law views insanity.
It’s often necessary to show a history of mental health troubles and treatment to argue insanity, Feingold said. People with postpartum depression or psychosis may not have any prior history of mental illness.
And postpartum psychosis has a tendency to wax and wane, she said: Someone with the condition can act normally hours before carrying out a horrendous act, hurting their chances of claiming insanity.
Infanticide statutes aren’t a universally agreed upon solution. The motives and competency of a mother who kills a newborn may be different than one who kills a baby months after birth. There is an active debate among experts about when mental illness plays a role in cases of mothers who kill their young children.
Moreover, along with critiques of outdated language, the existence of a law that solely applies to one gender raises alarm bells.
“Men can get depressed due to other factors, can get depressed if there’s a new baby,” said Susan Hatters-Friedman, professor of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio who has treated and written about women with postpartum psychosis. “Is it going down the right road to create different laws for women than men?”
She also questioned whether a change in law was needed when an insanity defense is available to women whose crimes were influenced by postpartum mental illness. In a 2012 article, Hatters-Friedman quoted scholars who questioned whether infanticide laws represented a form of sexism, portraying women as inherently hysterical and passive.
In the US, the insanity defense used in courts in various forms in 46 states, typically requires convincing a jury that mental illness caused a person to not understand the wrongfulness of their act. In Massachusetts, a defendant can seek a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Clancy had sought help for severe postpartum mental illness for months prior to her children’s deaths, according to suits filed by her and her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy.
In opening arguments of Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, prosecutor Shanan Buckingham emphasized that the existence of mental illness doesn’t automatically mean a defendant does not know the difference between right and wrong.
“The fact that someone may suffer or have a mental illness, a mental disease or defect, is not the end of the inquiry when it comes to guilt or innocence,” she said.
That amounts to capturing a snapshot of mental illness, which doesn’t reflect the reality of many conditions, said Christina Miller, a former prosecutor and assistant law professor at Suffolk University.
“The fluidness of how people experience mental illness doesn’t fit neatly in proving and diagnosing and looking at whether someone intended their crime at the time they committed their crime,” she said.
Insanity defenses are used in less than 1 percent of felony cases, according to Mental Health America, a national mental wellness nonprofit, and are successful about a quarter of the time.
Both the defense and prosecution conduct mental health evaluations, but the verdict ultimately hinges on what juries choose to believe, said Dan Conley, former Suffolk district attorney who now does defense work with the Mintz law firm.
In Illinois, the state legislature decided the criminal justice system needed more. Unlike English and Welsh law, the 2018 Illinois statute doesn’t create a new charge or defense, but does allow a judge to consider claims of postpartum depression or psychosis as mitigating factors in sentencing. Women already in prison can petition for resentencing if those conditions weren’t considered in their original trials.
A bill before the Massachusetts Legislature proposes similar resentencing considerations for women who claim their crimes were a result of postpartum depression or psychosis, and would make the presence of perinatal psychiatric illness a mitigating factor for any murder or any other case in which the punishment could be life without parole. It also gives any birth mother who commits a crime within 12 months of childbirth access to a psychiatric evaluation and expert treatment.
“Our bill would lend some clarity around how women like this are treated,” said Colbert, the Massachusetts activist, “some more fairness with connecting moms with treatment rather than punishment.”
The bill is currently subject to a study order and is not expected to move forward. Colbert said her group plans to refile it for the next legislative session in revised form so it would align with other diversion programs.
As evidence of Clancy’s guilt, prosecutors contend that she seemed well on the day she killed her children. She took one child to the doctor and helped the kids build a snowman.
That echoes the comments Walter Hale made in 1936. At some point after her trial, Brenda Hale apparently resumed living at home with her husband; she died in 1947.
A farmer, her husband said he and Brenda Hale had a happy marriage, according to coverage in the Daily Telegraph. Their first child, a boy, was born in 1934 and Brenda Hale was a devoted parent. But the article noted that Walter Hale recalled that just before their child’s death, his wife made an unusual complaint, something that would only become significant in hindsight.
“She thought her brain was going,” the newspaper reported, “and she could not concentrate.”
Two days later, Brenda Hale killed her baby.
Globe reporter Sarah Rahal contributed to this report
Jason Laughlin can be reached at jason.laughlin@globe.com. Follow him @jasmlaughlin.