“Sad case, very sad.”
Noah’s gaze is upon me. Normally I like being the centre of attention, and this is so even when someone as familiar as Noah is dishing it out. But when a gaze is preceded by so loaded a statement, my pleasure abates. I feel concern, even anxiety, in the pit of my stomach, and in my brain I wonder if I have been rumbled. These are unhappy feelings, and they can be assuaged only by a sharp riposte.
“How can you be so rude?” I exclaim, with what novelists would term “indignation”.
“Relax, I am not referring to you. Not everything is about you, you know.” Noah responds in a tone that novelists would term “exasperated”.
Shrugging off his exasperation, which he does almost palpably, Noah proceeds to explain. “A mother in Massachusetts strangled her three young children with a cord before slitting her wrists and jumping out of an upstairs window. The children died, but she survived.”
“Obviously, we all want to strangle our children sometimes,” I say flippantly, “but we don’t. I mean, think what the neighbours would say.”
Noah’s gaze is still upon me, but now it has become a glare. One of reproach, as the novelists… you get my drift. “This is not comedy hour down at the pub. It’s a sad, sad case.”
“Did they hang her? Now that they have abolished lynching, they like a good hanging in the States. Unless, of course, they abjure the rope, preferring instead to fry or poison you.”
“God, you can be impossible. No, is the short answer. In the trial, she pleaded insanity. In their law, as in ours, a person cannot be convicted of a crime if the act was committed while of unsound mind. We don’t hold people responsible if they haven’t the mental capacity to act responsibly.”
“Was she in fact mad?”
“It seems so. All but one of the jurors thought as much. At the time she had been taking pills designed to help her out of post-partum depression. The shrinks she consulted dished them out liberally, and she took them as prescribed. They blew her mind.”
“Interviewed in preparation for the trial, she spoke of a voice that told her she could only kill herself if first she sent her children to the Lord. She knew she was killing them, in short, but believed this was the route to her own salvation. She simply couldn’t comprehend the nature and extent of her conduct.”
“Hmmm.”
“As I say, all but one of the jurors believed her. The dissenter was a man who simply couldn’t understand how a mother could do something so horrible. The children, all under five, looked angelic in the pic taken shortly before their death.”
“Well, angelic they may have looked, but it was premature to make them so.” There must be something wrong with me. Tragedy gives me a gallows humour that I find irrepressible. Perhaps I can plead insanity.
Noah’s glare has given way to a scowl, but he regards this as sufficient. Sometimes no response is response enough.
“So, the upshot was a hung jury. The case will have to be retried.”
“The result has created a Twitter storm. The women largely empathise, but the men condemn her as a monster. We might have had less controversy, I suppose, if she had elected to give evidence. This is something she could have done, now in proper possession of her senses. But her counsel, exploiting the local law, decided in their wisdom to keep her out of the box. She sat in her wheelchair shtum throughout the trial.”
“How grotesque!” I exclaim.
“In South Africa, the decision – testify or no – would have been harder to make. In common with English law, we assume that a person is sane unless the contrary is proved. Reliance on expert evidence might do, but the court would typically expect to hear the accused in person before making a decision. That is, always supposing she was sane enough to testify.”
“If, in the new trial, she succeeds in her defence, will she be acquitted?” I ask.
“Yes, but she will almost certainly be remitted to a mental institution, where she will be held for what is likely to be a very long time. Society cannot risk a repetition of the incident.”
Thank goodness, Noah has ceased making facial contortions. Now he looks quite sweet, and this makes him endearing. “Wasn’t there someone in Greek mythology who killed her own children?”
“Yes, my dear.”
“But who was it?” Such pedantry is frustrating.
“I’ve already told you. Medea. When Jason left her, she killed their children in a fit of rage. But an alternative version of the tale says she wanted to make them immortal.”
“Hysteria repeating itself?” I say, as the novelists put it, quizzically.
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