They are all our children

Funnelling children into the criminal justice system is surely populist and shortsighted.

- Charlotte Grimshaw

Among recent reports of criminal cases, none generated more intense discussion than the tragic trial of a mother charged with murder. As it became a complex battle of experts, we engaged in the court's painstaking scrutiny of the family dynamic. Watching it unfold, we all had our own ideas about the case.

A pivotal detail was the mother's statement to police that one of her toddlers had been especially awful to her, so she'd killed that child first. Here was evidence of supreme irrationality. The notion that a 2-year-old could contrive to be horrible, by effort of will (as if recreationally or maliciously), was, in the colloquial sense, "insane". And yet, in a reasonable decision, the jury rejected the legal defence of insanity or infanticide and found the mother guilty of murder.