Postpartum Depression and Infanticide: Shades of Gray

A mother struggling with severe postpartum depression leaves her two-week-old son unattended in the bathtub, where he drowns. She then drives to a nearby reservoir, weighs his body down with rocks, and tells multiple lies to law enforcement about what happened.

At her first murder trial, the mother - let's call her Heidi - has an attorney who fails to raise the issue of her mental state as a possible defense, despite the fact that Heidi was hospitalized just days after her son's death for depression, suicidal thoughts, and panic attacks. A female juror refuses to convict on the first-degree murder charge, resulting in a mistrial due to a hung jury.

The prosecution brings the case to trial again and this time convicts Heidi of second-degree murder. She receives a mandatory 50-year prison sentence.

Heidi serves nine years in prison before the state supreme court rules she is entitled to a new trial because her original trial counsel had failed to consider her mental state.

After ten months of freedom, however, Heidi pleads guilty to multiple acts of child endangerment. She is sentenced to up to 50 years in prison.

At sentencing, Heidi's attorney points out that in 29 countries around the world, when a mother who kills a child under the age of one can prove that her mental state was disturbed due to childbirth, the maximum penalty is manslaugher. Most of these countries limit the consequences to probation and counseling.

After sentencing, the judge says he will take the practically unprecedented step of writing a letter urging the parole board to consider Heidi's release. Even the prosecutor, in pursuit of her for so long, acknowledges that she is no longer a threat to public safety and says he will write a letter to the parole board, too.

In this almost unspeakably sad story, Heidi is Heidi Anfinson of Des Moines, who killed her young son Jacob in the third week of September in 1998 - right about the time my wife and I moved to Des Moines to start jobs there. Heidi was ELCA Lutheran, as we were, and about our age, so her case has always seemd quite close to home. Indeed, the older of our two sons was born in Des Moines and spent the first few weeks of his life there before we moved to Minnesota.

"There but for the grace of God go I," a Christian will sometimes say when showing mercy.

The criminal justice system, of course, has a very different point of departure. Yet there, too, the principal actors in this dark drama have struggled to find a proper response. Scott Rosenberg, the judge who sentenced Heidi Anfison on her plea agreement, put it this way:

"We often like to think of things in black and white. But often, it is the gray that is the truth."

What color will the Iowa Board of Parole see in Heidi Anfinson's case, I wonder - and when will it act?

Marguerite at the Scaffold

In the third act of Minnesota Opera’s production of Gounod’s “Faust,” Marguerite — the woman Faust seduced and abandoned — is in her prison cell, awaiting execution for killing their child. Amid the orgiastic chaos of Walpurgis Night, Faust sees a vision of her facing the scaffold and, with assistance from Mephistopheles, visits her in prison. Refusing Faust’s pleas for her to escape with him, Marguerite goes to the gallows. Her soul is saved, however, after she implores heaven for help and angels intervene.

However one interprets the cosmology behind the Faust legend, one cannot but see Marguerite’s plight through the prism of what we now know about postpartum depression. Rather than the devil being personified by Mephistopheles, it often comes in the form of “The Noonday Demon,” as Andrew Solomon put it in his National Book Award-winning book. Solomon’s book deals broadly with the phenomenon of depression, of which past-partum is one (often terrible) type.

The most notorious national case of filicide is probably that of Andrea Yates, who in 2001 killed her five young children (ages six years to six months) by drowning them one by one in the bathtub of their Houston home. Yates had been battling postpartum depression and psychosis for years, but was initially sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 40 years. That sentence was later overturned and in 2006 a Texas jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. The court then committed Yates to a state mental hospital. The terrible circumstances of her case are well documented in “Are You Alone?” by Suzanne O’Malley and “Breaking Point” by Suzy Spencer.

Another tragic case of the criminal justice system’s failure to take proper account of postpartum depression is still unfolding in Iowa. Heidi Anfinson was convicted of second-degree murder after her two-week-old son Jacob drowned in bathwater in September 1998 while under her care. Anfinson contended that Jacob’s death was an accident, but she was sent to prison, despite considerable evidence (not adduced at trial) that she was suffering from post-partum depression.

After years of legal battles, Anfinson’s conviction was overturned in October 2008. In granting her the right to a new trial, the Iowa Court of Appeals held that Anfinson’s trial counsel had erred in ignoring evidence of her compromised mental state. Even if her counsel was not making outright defenses of insanity or diminished responsibility at trial, the appellate court found that evidence of the toll depression had taken on her was directly relevant to her defense of accidental death.

This evidence could have helped the jury understand how Anfinson could have left her infant in the bath while going into the next room to use the telephone, why she might bury the body under rocks at a nearby lake, and why she might seem flat and unemotional to investigators when questioned about Jacob’s disappearance. If Heidi Anfinson was suffering from severe post-partum depression, a condition so bad it included elements of self-mutilation, her behavior may not have been bizarre at all. Criminal justice practitioners should learn to recognize signs of "the noonday demon" when they see it, even if its calling cards are not always Faustian devils with horns and tails.