https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm28md08lmgo

A mother jailed for murdering her eight-week-old son and attempting to murder his toddler sister is to have her convictions quashed, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

The woman, whose identity is protected by an anonymity order, accepted having stabbed the children, but denied the charges.

On Friday, senior judges held that the guilty verdicts over the double stabbing back in July 2021 were unsafe.

No further details about their decision can be published at this stage for legal reasons.

Both the prosecution and defence representatives remain in dispute on any possible retrial.

The woman was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in June 2023, following a jury trial at Belfast Crown Court.

She had been found guilty of murdering her son by a majority verdict and unanimously convicted of attempting to murder her then two-year-old daughter.

Both children had been taken to the Royal Belfast Hospital for sick children, where the girl was successfully treated, with the boy later pronounced dead.

The woman's lawyers mounted a legal bid to overturn the guilty verdict, based on issues around the trial process.

Lady Chief Justice Dame Siobhan Keegan, sitting in the Court of Appeal, backed those grounds of challenge, saying that she "cannot be satisfied that the convictions are safe".

The woman currently remains in custody while the court seeks further clarification on any potential retrial.

by Objective_Fox3483

7 comments

  1. I don’t know anything surrounding this but regardless of any “issues around the trial process”, she admitted to stabbing her children, so what on earth could be so bad that this has been overturned?

  3. I presume it’s around manslaughter on basis of diminished responsibility. Maybe wasn’t presented lawfully

  4. Given how difficult it is to get the justice system to admit that they are wrong I presume that this is the right decision.

    If I had to guess by the reporting from two years ago, and the basis of the challenge, my assumption would be that insufficient weight was given to her mental condition at the time either by the judge or an expert witness gave shoddy evidence.

    Also possible that some evidence that would have aided her case was witheld by the prosecution.

    Will be interesting to see the reasoning when they do release it.

  5. Seems you can just roll the dice these days and whatever comes up is the sentence you get. Assaulting 5 different women on separate occasions? £300 fine. Breaking into a woman’s house with a knife and trying to rape her? 9 months. Killing your kid? 20 years but since you rolled a 6 you can roll again. 

  6. 20 years…that’s a lot given they like to hand out small sentences for men who do unthinkable things.

  7. Is this the incident that happened in Ardoyne? I remember someone who would know quite a bit about post birth conditions (probably a better term for it). But they said it really sounded like a mental breakdown that specifically causes this type of action, there was a name for the syndrome but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. Although that was at the time where very few details were known at the time so maybe it wasn’t that.

Comments are closed.