An Irish Comment on a Salvadoran Sentence

[MOJ-friend--and Trinity College Dublin law prof--Gerry Whyte responds to these posts:  here and here:]

Reading today’s MOJ, I came across the item about El Salvador and the questionable reporting of a case by the New York Times magazine. While I understand that the thrust of the item is about the obligation on reporters to check facts, what struck me about the case was the fact that a woman guilty of what we would call infanticide was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment. From time to time, new born infants are found dead in this country but the authorities always proceed with great sensitivity towards the mother and prosecutions are rarely taken. (Back in the 1980s, there was a controversial case in Co. Kerry that achieved notoriety and resulted in a public inquiry but that was controversial because of the manner in which the police investigated the case, not because of the fact that a newborn infant was found dead.) Now it may be that the Irish cases are entirely cases of abandonment and not deliberate killing, so that the Irish response might not be directly comparable to that of the authorities in El Salvador.  Nonetheless, isn’t thirty years for infanticide somewhat harsh, given that in the immediate aftermath of childbirth, the mother might not be fully responsible for her actions?