0812994523.pdf

inflammatory evidence that Marsha was poor, a prior drug user, and obviously a bad mother
for not seeking prenatal care. Police investigators went into her home and took photographs
of an unflushed toilet and a beer can on the floor, which were waved in front of the jury as
evidence of neglect and bad parenting.
Mrs. Colbey consistently maintained during multiple interrogations that the baby was
stillborn. She told investigators that her son was born dead and never took a breath, despite
her efforts to revive him. Mrs. Colbey rejected the State’s offer of a plea agreement, pursuant
to which she would have gone to prison for eighteen years, because she was adamant that she
had done nothing wrong.
The prosecution of Marsha Colbey eventually caught the attention of the press, which was
titillated by another “dangerous mother” story. The crime was sensationalized by the local
media, which lauded the police and prosecutor for coming to the aid of a defenseless infant.
Demonizing irresponsible mothers had become a media craze by the time Marsha’s trial was
scheduled. Tragic narratives of mothers killing their children were national sensations. When
Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Texas in 2001 , the tragedy became a national
story. Susan Smith’s effort to blame random black men for the death of her children in South
Carolina before later admitting to murdering them fascinated crime-obsessed Americans. In
time, media interest in these kinds of stories grew into a national preoccupation. Time
magazine called the prosecution of Casey Anthony, the young Florida mother ultimately
acquitted in the death of her two-year-old daughter, the “social media trial of the century”
after the story generated nonstop coverage on cable networks.
The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental
illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and
bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption
of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult
circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America’s preeminent status among
developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much
higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate
health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this
country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an
embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the
world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose
children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across
the country began to bear witness.
Communities were on the lookout for bad moms who should be put in prison. About the
same time as Marsha’s prosecution, Bridget Lee gave birth to a stillborn baby in Pickens
County, Alabama. She was charged with capital murder and wrongfully imprisoned. Lee, a
church pianist, mother of two, and bank bookkeeper, had gotten pregnant after an
extramarital affair. Scared and depressed, the thirty-four-year-old hid her pregnancy and
hoped to secretly put the child up for adoption. But she went into labor five weeks before her
due date, and the baby was stillborn. She didn’t tell her husband about the stillbirth, which
aroused suspicion. The disreputable circumstances surrounding Lee’s pregnancy were enough
to influence the pathologist who conducted the autopsy to conclude that the stillborn baby
was born alive and was then suffocated by Lee. Months after Lee was arrested and charged