Book review: Murder, Medicine and Motherhood
Author | Angela M Moe |
Published date | 01 November 2012 |
Date | 01 November 2012 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480612452145 |
Subject Matter | Book reviews |
521
Comité européen pour les problèmes criminels (1980) Rapport sur la décriminalisation. Strasbourg:
Council of Europe.
Feest J and Paul B (2008) Abolitionismus: Einige Antworten auf oft gestellte Fragen. Kriminolo-
gisches Journal 40(1): 6–20.
Loader I (2010) For penal moderation: Notes towards a public philosophy of punishment.
Theoretical Criminology 14(3): 349–367.
Emma Cunliffe, Murder, Medicine and Motherhood, Hart Publishing: Portland, OR and Oxford, 2011;
246 pp.: 9781849461573, US$70 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Angela M Moe, Western Michigan University, USA
Murder, Medicine and Motherhood, by Emma Cunliffe, a law professor at the University of
British Columbia, is a richly detailed and comprehensive critique of the criminal case
against Kathleen Folbigg. A notorious instance of alleged filicide in Australia, Folbigg was
convicted in 2003 for serially killing (through smothering) her four young children between
1989 and 1997. The children, Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura, ranged in age from 19 days
to 19 months at the time of their deaths. Cunliffe maintains that Folbigg was wrongly con-
victed (although she does not declare Folbigg’s outright innocence), based upon evidentiary
principles and procedural law. She posits that Folbigg faced condemnation based on the fact
that the four children died under her (primary) care, presumably in their sleep. Though only
one (the last) of the deaths was initially considered suspicious, Cunliffe persuasively argues
that Folbigg was found guilty of all four deaths largely because the odds of such a tragedy
happening within one family due to natural (though unknown) causes is too great.
Cunliffe’s thesis is based upon an impressively detailed account of the legal case
against Folbigg, which among other things, involved a substantial amount of coincidence
evidence (e.g. an oversimplified comparison between the children’s deaths), an unques-
tioned acceptance of Craig Folbigg’s (Kathleen’s estranged...
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