Laws get tougher as mental illness defense fades for mothers

PHILADELPHIA -- Prosecutors once branded Marie Noe "as much a mass murderer as Ted Bundy." But they soon took pity on the retiree.

While Bundy got the electric chair in Florida in 1989, Noe was given a plea bargain: For smothering eight of her infant children as a young mother, the Philadelphia woman got probation and five years under house arrest.

The 1999 sentence angered critics, who said Noe deserved prison even though she was 70 and it had been 30 years since the last murder.

Four years later, that sort of sentence has become virtually unthinkable.

Legal experts say prosecutors are getting tougher with mothers who kill.

In Texas, Andrea Yates began serving a life sentence last year for drowning her five children in the bathtub. The jury rejected her insanity defense.

It also rejected the death penalty after 35 minutes.

Christina Riggs, who smothered her two young sons, was executed in Arkansas in 2000.

Experts said two more women charged this month with murdering their children are likely to be treated more like Yates than Noe, who suffocated her babies between 1949 and 1968, then stayed silent while doctors blamed "crib death," or sudden infant death syndrome.

Two weeks ago, Deanna LaJune Laney, 38, was charged with capital murder in Texas after she allegedly confessed to bashing the heads of her three young sons with rocks, killing two of them.

On Tuesday, police in New York state charged Dianne Odell, 49, of Rome, Pa., with murdering three infant children in the 1970s and '80s, then hiding their bodies in a storage shed in Arizona.

For decades, cases like that were written off to mental illness. But that is less likely nowadays, said Northeastern University criminologist James Fox.

"We have seen too many cases of mothers who played on our sympathies," he said. "There is a recognition now that mothers do kill their children in a cold-blooded and selfish way."

He said society's view of women who commit infanticide began to change with heavy news coverage of killers like Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman sentenced to life in 1995 for drowning her two sons in a lake, then claiming they had been abducted. The defense argued unsuccessfully that she was mentally ill and that the drownings were a failed suicide attempt.

Women are now more likely to be sentenced to death for killing their children, said Victor L. Streib, a law professor at Ohio Northern University.

Of the 11 U.S. women on death row for killing their children, six were sentenced in the past five years, he said. Only one was sentenced before 1990.

"Juries regularly reject the insanity defense now," Streib said. "In cases like Yates, you say, 'Wow, she is just really crazy,' and yet a jury rejects the insanity defense."

The lead prosecutor in Noe's case, Charles Gallagher, defended Noe's sentence in an interview last week, saying a long prison term would have been inappropriate.

"Is she a threat to any other children? No. Would it be wiser to give that jail cell to a drug dealer who is shooting up the neighborhood? Yes." he said. "If she were to go to jail, where would we put her? Probably a state hospital."

Now 74, Noe has spent the past four years living in a Philadelphia rowhouse with her husband and meeting occasionally with psychiatrists and probation officials. She is scheduled to complete her house arrest in June 2004. After that, she will be on probation for 15 years.

It appears one element of the plea bargain that allowed Noe to keep her freedom may go unfulfilled: The deal required her to be studied by doctors, with the goal of helping society understand her crime. But so far, the limited research that has been done has been sealed by a judge and is unlikely to be shared with other scientists.

Arthur Caplan, chairman of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said doctors who meet with Noe are probably barred by ethical constraints, and possibly a new medical privacy law, from sharing their observations.