What Do You Have To Do To Be 'A Bad Mother' In This Country?

Gemma Procter, 23... had a history of heavy drinking from the age of 16 and smoked cannabis daily and took amphetamines every other day, a court heard. 

...

(Procter) had undergone an abortion and she became convinced God was speaking to her and started to display bizarre psychotic symptoms and attending the local Abundant Life religious centre.

On 21 October last year, she was at her high rise home, in Newcastle House, Barkerend, with Elliot, her mother Deborah Ashington, her eight-month-old daughter and two other girls aged eleven and six.

Prosecutor Kama Melly QC told Bradford Crown Court that Procter had only smoked one joint that day, but after dancing around the flat in a red dress, which exposed her body, she told her mum she felt 'free and at peace'.

And that's when she threw her 18 month toddler Elliot out of the sixth floor window. In front of the other children.

Simon Kealey QC, defending, said Procter had suffered a 'sudden deterioration' in her health which could not have been foreseen.

No, clearly the drinking, drug taking, loose morals and sudden religious psychosis were no clue at all...

Proctor wept in the dock during the proceedings which were disrupted from members of her family in a packed public gallery, prompting The Recorder of Bradford, Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC to threaten them with contempt if they continued.

We aren't enlightened by the press as to what the commotion was all about. Presumably they were upset that she wasn't being awarded 'Mother Of The Year'.

Sentencing Procter to a hospital order, Judge Durham Hall told her paranoid schizophrenia had struck her like a volcanic eruption.

'The primary victim is Elliot, but the second victim is you,' he said.

'No one had the remotest premonition you would do what you did.

'I am absolutely satisfied that nobody, including yourself, had any concerns or pre-warning that you could or would do what you did.

'Your offending, I am satisfied, was due to this extreme illness. The harm is off the scale, but the culpability is not.

'Nobody thinks that you were ever a bad mother and you were never a bad mother to Elliot.'

I guess if she'd ever denied him ice cream, the social services would have acted. But she didn't, so was free to murder him instead.

I get the idea of compassion for mental illness, truly, I do. But this - this description of a drinking, drug taking benefit monkey as 'a good mother' - is so out of kilter it's obscene.