Women Who Kill Their Children: Case Study and Conclusions Concerning the Differences in the Fall from Material Grace by Khoua Her and Andrea Yates

I. INTRODUCTION The disparate treatment of white, middle-class women and poor women of color in the criminal justice system and contemporary popular discourse has been well documented. (1) However, less attention has been given to how this harsher treatment of poor women of color manifests itself in the media coverage of cases of infanticide. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the roles of race and culture, class, marital status, and biology in the media's treatment of two infanticidal women, Khoua Her and Andrea Yates. On September 3, 1998, in St. Paul, Minnesota, Khoua Her, a Hmong immigrant who had been living in the United States for several years, (2) strangled her six children and attempted suicide before calling 911 to report the incident. (3) At the time of the strangling, Her was a twenty-four-year-old working mother estranged from her husband. (4) She was ultimately sentenced to fifty years imprisonment under the terms of a plea bargain that required her to plead guilty to six counts of intentional second-degree murder for the killing of her children. (5) On June 20, 2001, in Clear Lake, Texas, Yates, a thirty-six-year-old white, middle-class, fundamentalist Christian homemaker in a traditional marriage, drowned her five children in the bath tub before calling 911 and her husband to report her actions. On August 8, 2001, Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two charges of capital murder for the deaths of two of her sons and her daughter. (6) To support the insanity plea, Yates's lawyers claimed that she was suffering from postpartum depression at the time of the murders. (7) She was determined competent to stand trial, (8) and on March 12, 2002 was found guilty of the two capital murder charges. (9) Three days later, on March 15, the jury deliberated for approximately 35 minutes before recommending a sentence of life in prison instead of the death penalty, (10) and Yates was formally sentenced on March 18, 2002. (11) Yates will be eligible for parole in 2041, (12) and her lawyers have submitted notice of appeal. (13) Both the reduction in penalty and the lodging of the appeal are indicative of a general belief that Yates deserves some degree of leniency in the punishment of her crimes. Apart from the formal legal process, both women's acts have been subject to a precursory "trial by media. " This article will trace the different explanatory narratives that emerge in these media trials, with some brief analysis of the post-verdict media treatment to which Yates has been subject. Part II will discuss what constitutes "valued motherhood" in this discourse, and trace the respective "worth" of the mothering done by Her and Yates as it is presented in the media accounts of their crimes. Part III will outline the deployment of images of "mad" and "bad" mothers in infanticide cases, and describe how the image of a "mad" mother is more readily mobilized by the media to explain the actions of white mothers who kill, than those of poor women of color. Finally, Part IV will consider the social, legal, and political functions served by labeling white women "mad" and women of color "bad" in the treatment of infanticidal women. In undertaking such an analysis, this article follows the line of a number of postmodern accounts of motherhood and crime which highlight how society generally delivers more punitive treatment to those women who do not meet the ideal norms of motherhood, including poor women of color. (14) However, by focusing on how this pattern of treatment plays out in the media in the context of infanticide, where technically all of the offenders have drastically failed to meet the ideal maternal myth because they have killed their children and therefore theoretically should all be subject to similar levels of punitive treatment because they are equally "bad," it is hoped that the race/culture/class bases for disparate treatment will be brought into even sharper relief. …