A woman sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing her daughter by throwing the infant in the trash after giving birth at her college sorority house should be resentenced, according to a divided Ohio Supreme Court.
The justices also directed that Emilie Weaver, now 27, be resentenced before a different judge.
In April 2015, she was convicted of aggravated murder and several other counts in connection with the death of the child.
Weaver could have been sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in as little as 20 years, as her attorney requested, but Judge Mark Fleegle said he wasn’t convinced Weaver was remorseful.
In 2017, Weaver sought post-conviction relief, claiming her lawyer failed to provide a complete explanation of neonaticide and that she should have received a lesser sentence. The murder of an infant within 24 hours of birth is known as neonaticide.
Fleegle, who also presided over the post-conviction relief hearing, called an expert witness who attempted to explain Weaver’s condition into question. An appellate court upheld the sentence, but the state Supreme Court found Weaver had ineffective counsel at her sentencing in a 4-3 decision announced Thursday.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor stated that Fleegle demonstrated an arbitrary and unreasonable attitude toward evidence of both neonaticide and “pregnancy-negation syndrome,” in which a person is in denial about their pregnancy.
Prosecutors claim Weaver gave birth in a bathroom at Muskingum University’s Delta Gamma Theta sorority, then purposefully killed her baby. According to authorities, the baby girl died of asphyxiation after Weaver placed her in a plastic trash bag and left her outside the sorority house.
Weaver testified at trial that she was in denial about the pregnancy and assumed the baby was already dead when she threw the newborn away.
