Leanne Azzopardi held her "miracle" five-week-old baby for a long time until something clicked. "I just couldn't do it anymore," the Caroline Springs woman eventually confessed to police on July 18 last year. Her brain was "mentally gone".
Earlier that day, she had dunked baby Hayley face down in the bath, at first for a minute, "to give her a bit of a fright" and then, once the baby turned blue, for more than an hour. It was also why she later made a hysterical call to her husband, claiming an intruder had tied her up and drowned the child. Why she then tried to stage a burglary; strewed some clothing around, taped her own hands, feet and mouth.
When Azzopardi, now 32, discovered she was pregnant, it was the sweetest news because she had feared she was infertile. But after Hayley's birth, the disappointments started piling up: recovering from a caesarean, having to stop breastfeeding due to problems with milk supply, broken nights, worries about the baby's weight. As Supreme Court Judge Murray Kellam said this week, "the gulf between the idealised version and the reality and difficulty of caring for a small child" weighed on a depressed Azzopardi.
This week, she was sentenced to an 18-month, community-based order after pleading guilty to infanticide. This comes amid news an 18-year-old Victorian schoolgirl has been charged with the murder of her baby son, who allegedly died of head injuries within minutes of birth.
The Azzopardi case has thrown new light on a much-criticised law recently put under the microscope of the Victorian Law Reform Commission. Yet it has withstood scrutiny to emerge largely intact, with some minor adjustments designed to tailor it to the times. In Victoria, infanticide is both a defence to murder and an alternative, lesser charge carrying a maximum penalty of five months' jail. It applies only to a mother who can prove "the balance of her mind" was disturbed by the effect of childbirth or breastfeeding at the time she killed her baby. The law also requires the child be less than 12 months old.
Infanticide is a curious beast burdened with historical baggage at once merciful and paternalistic. Rarely used, (there were no infanticide convictions between 1997 and 2001) it gives rise to unease among feminists, child advocates and some criminal lawyers.
Infanticide rests on the philosophy that the symbiotic intimacy between mother and child makes it a relationship like no other. Therefore, the argument goes, the very act of a mother killing her child is proof of madness. Implicit is the idea of the female body as a potentially dangerous, hormonal inferno.
"It's providing an outmoded link between women's bodies and crime," says Monash University's associate professor of law, Bernadette McSherry. "But I guess you have to find a balance between over-medicalising women who kill and affording some leniency to them."
Governments in Australia and beyond are reluctant, even when encouraged, to scrap the offence. Law reform bodies in NSW, Britain and Canada have, in recent years, urged for the abolition of infanticide, but none of these jurisdictions rose to the challenge.
Indeed, the commission's report, released last month, urges retaining, and even expanding, infanticide as a separate offence for mothers, while simultaneously pushing to abolish the defence of provocation. This defence, used recently by Balwyn businessman James Ramage who killed his wife, is seen as sympathetic to men who kill their female partners in a rage.
But the commission's recent report on Defences to Homicide recommends that infanticide should not only retained but widened to cover the killing of a child aged up to two years. It also recommends that the law should cover cases of older children where the woman also has a child aged under two.
In opting against scrapping the offence, the commission acted on the advice of legal and medical experts. It said that infanticide recognises "a distinctive kind of human tragedy". It does, however, recommend abolishing the reference to breastfeeding, given the lack of medical evidence linking lactation with mental disturbance.
Commission chairwoman Marcia Neave says a major problem with abolishing infanticide is that most mothers who kill their children are not psychotic and therefore could not resist a murder conviction by reason of mental impairment. The commission report also states that "infanticide avoids the labelling of a woman as a murderer, which may be particularly damaging to her capacity to recover from and come to terms with what she had done".
At Deer Park Women's Prison after her arrest, Azzopardi was placed in an isolation cell, where she could hear inmates yelling about "the f---king baby killer". The stigma and guilt of these cases are immense, but the decision to keep infanticide as part of the law does alarm some child-welfare advocates.
Says Joe Tucci, of the Australian Childhood Foundation: "I don't support it; I think it sends the wrong message by taking the focus off the rights of the children. Society should be strengthening the laws that protect children, not weakening them."
Tucci backs the call for more resources to help mothers on the edge, but is troubled by the implications of infanticide as it played out in a case like Azzopardi's. "There's still the fact that a five-week-old baby was killed and I'm not sure that the infanticide charge adequately reflects the vulnerability of children at that age and it doesn't give a message about the need for infants to be protected by the adults around them," he says.
Tucci says the preliminary findings of research carried out by the foundation and Victoria Police into child homicides committed over the past 30 years suggest child killers already get lighter sentences than those who murder adults.
Criminologist Ken Polk, whose research on child victims of homicide informed much of the commission's work, was "a little surprised" about the recommendation to expand infanticide to the killing of children up to the age of two. He says when you look at some of the cases involving the killing of children aged between one and two, "you start to merge with the so-called battered babies".
"Under the age of one, you don't often have the serious batteries but after 18 months . . . you do start to see them," Polk says. "The child is by then generally old enough to be seen by parents as engaging in purposive behaviour, which makes them think they're disciplining the child. I'm not supportive of women getting the infanticide defence in these circumstances."
The "battered baby" cases involve mothers who, often with the help of their partners, lethally assault their children. But Polk's concern is tempered with the knowledge that the prosecution is likely to charge the woman with a more severe offence if warranted. Victorian Law Institute president Chris Dale agrees: "It's really a matter of evidence about whether the postnatal depression extends beyond the 12 months. So rather than saying 'let's criticise it (the commission) for blowing out the time period', let's understand that this will always come down to a question of proof in individual cases." Neave concedes that raising the age limit is controversial. The decision stems from research suggesting that psychiatric illnesses sparked by giving birth often take two years to resolve.
"The forensic psychiatrists thought one was too young, while five was too old," Neave explains. "But I wouldn't say there's any precision in it."
In truth, there never was. The infanticide offence, first created in Britain in 1922, came as a result of public pressure that sought to spare mothers from the death penalty. While a simple link between childbirth and insanity was widely accepted, the law was as much a compassionate response to the social circumstances of women who killed their babies.
The commission points out that most of the early offenders were "unmarried, young and often servant girls who had either been raped or seduced by their employers". For these women, a future of social ostracism and economic hardship lay ahead. Reformers had originally pushed for factors such as poverty and abandonment to be taken into account when assessing the mother's state of mind. But the law's focus was squarely on physiology, not sociology, and mothers who kill have been squeezed into a legal straitjacket ever since.
The problem now is that the medicine is murky. Experts are divided on what triggers postnatal depression, with the American Psychiatric Association, for instance, not recognising the condition as a separate disorder. The social and economic stresses of motherhood are now regarded as playing as big a role as hormones in causing women to unravel.
The Law Reform Commission recommends changing the wording of the offence to include a catch-all of "any disorder consequent upon childbirth", but rejected a more radical option of making infanticide available to non-biological mothers.
Associate Professor Anne Buist, an expert in depression resulting from pregnancy who gave evidence in the Azzopardi case, identifies lack of marital support and social isolation as major risk factors for depression in the "standard mum" with no history of mental problems.
"You've got no one helping, you're up at 3am. And if you're depressed and anxious, then the babies are anxious and can't sleep and everything escalates. And then throw in something extra, say a vulnerable or obsessive personality who has an idealised view of motherhood and is reluctant to admit they're depressed."
Someone like Azzopardi, for instance. The former bank officer called a helpline for depressed mothers on at least four occasions. But a fortnight before the killing, when a child health nurse visited, she insisted that everything was all right.
Said Justice Kellam: "You believed that motherhood would be the most satisfying and important experience of your life." These days, Azzopardi reminisces about Hayley and visits her grave; her miracle baby now an agonising memory.