Is Mom Guilty of Abuse Boyfriend Committed?
Dec. 2 -- An Illinois mother who has served seven years of a 36-year murder sentence is set to be released from prison after a court ruled she should not be held accountable for her boyfriend's killing of her daughter.
The decision to overturn her conviction is drawing attention to hundreds of similar cases nationwide. In all of them, mothers were held accountable for abuse suffered by their children — but inflicted by others.
In October 1995, in Kewanee, Ill., 3-year-old Jami Sue Pollock was beaten and choked to death by her mother's boyfriend. He is serving a life sentence. But Jami Sue's mother Tabitha was also convicted of murder, even though she was asleep at the time her daughter was killed.
"Tabitha Pollock was prosecuted under a theory of liability that she could be guilty of first-degree murder, not if she knew that her children were being abused, but if she should have known that her children were being abused," Tabitha Pollock's lawyer, Jane Raley, said.
After an appeals court initially upheld the verdict, Pollock's previous lawyer told her the case was hopeless and resigned.
Pollock didn't give up hope, though. She wrote a letter to the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.
"She writes in this letter, 'I was convicted of murder because I should have known that my boyfriend would have done this. I should have been a mind reader. How should I have known this? This is not fair,'" Raley said.
Lawyers at the Center on Wrongful Convictions agreed.
They took her case and appealed it to the Illinois Supreme Court. Two months ago, the court overturned her conviction, even though the deadline for an appeal had passed.
And, in another rare move, the court ruled the state could not retry her.
During arguments before the supreme court, Illinois Assistant Attorney General Colleen Griffin argued that the precedent set in a case in which the state supreme court upheld the convictions of two women under similar circumstances was that mothers could be held accountable even if they did not know about the abuse, because they should have.
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