Let’s imagine for a moment that Marilyn Lemak’s suicide attempt had succeeded, and that in addition to killing her three children, she had killed herself as well. How would we have made sense of her actions? Would we have seen her as a scheming demon, who maliciously set out to destroy her husband David Lemak’s life? Or would we have sighed at the futility of these deaths, wishing only that we would have known before how sick and troubled she was?
The fact that Marilyn Lemak did not succeed in killing herself, but only in killing her children, does not make her into a cold-blooded monster. By any definition except the absurdly technical standard employed by our judicial system–whereby even one who kills, then cooks and eats his victims is found sane–we would agree that Lemak was crazy when she killed her kids.
As shocking as Lemak’s acts seem, infanticide is one of the oldest crimes known to humankind. For thousands of years, mothers have killed their children. And for hundreds of years, humans have struggled to agree on how these women should be punished. Throughout common law history, juries and judges have tended to agree on one thing: When a mother kills her child, it is generally different from other forms of homicide. Different because these cases are not only about the horror of dead children, but also about desperate and deeply troubled women.
This does not mean Lemak should be absolved of responsibility for her heinous acts. Rather, she should receive the punishment appropriate to her under the circumstances. There are three justifications for punishment in our criminal justice system: deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution.
Marilyn Lemak certainly does not need punishment to deter her from killing more children in the future–indeed, there are numerous mechanisms by which we might monitor her behavior, reproductive and otherwise. Nor can we seriously argue that, by punishing Lemak harshly, we can stop other mothers who are thinking of killing their children. Can anyone honestly suggest that a person such as Lemak will be deterred from killing her children so long as she knows that she will face the death penalty or life imprisonment as a result? Likewise, one cannot justify incarceration by invoking rehabilitation. There are few services that will be of help to Lemak in the penitentiary. Our sole justification for punishment in this case, as in others, is our need for retribution–we want Lemak to pay for the deaths she caused.
But how much should she “pay” given what we know about her mental state when she committed her crime? And what do we, as a society, gain by invoking the harshest punishments against mothers who kill their children: death or life in prison?
What we hope to gain is peace of mind. Punishing her harshly permits us to feel as though we have staked out a stance in favor of protecting children. But by ignoring the obvious facts that surround this case, and cases like it, we actually do nothing to protect children. In retrospect, the deaths of either Lemak or her children, like Houstonian Andrea Yates or her children, were almost inevitable. It was only a matter of time until these severely mentally ill women harmed themselves or their children.
Their lives were marked by the social and emotional isolation that has become commonplace among so many mothers. Unlike generations of women throughout human history, mothers today are expected to parent their young children alone–bereft of the support of extended family, neighbors and friends.
Apparently, no one was close enough to Lemak to witness just how precarious her balance had become.
If we truly care about protecting children, we must begin to ask, and to answer, the hard questions about what society might do to alleviate the struggles that accompany motherhood. Mothering without an extensive support network is hard work. For those who are most vulnerable–the mentally ill, for instance–it may be impossible.
We can lock Lemak away for the rest of her life, but if we think that constitutes an effective response to the distressing persistence of infanticide in contemporary culture, then we are just as crazy as the desperate woman who committed this heinous crime.
