[kwflatbed]

BOSTON -- The state's highest court has reduced the first-degree murder conviction of a Cape Cod mother who confessed to smothering her 2-year-old daughter.
The Supreme Judicial Court says Erin Colleran was an otherwise doting mother who was in a profound depression when she attacked her daughter Skyler while she slept in their Sandwich home in 2001.
A Barnstable Superior Court jury rejected her insanity defense and convicted her of first-degree murder, finding the smothering premeditated and particularly cruel.
But the SJC said in its ruling Thursday that the "interests of justice" call for her conviction to be reduced to second-degree murder. The court also threw out her life sentence and sent the case back to a lower court for a new sentence.

http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/local/BO92471/

 

[kwflatbed]

Mom Convicted In Girl's Death Gets New Sentence

A woman accused of smothering her two-year-old daughter to death has received a new sentence.

Erin Colleran was resentenced Friday in Barnstable Superior Court to life in prison for killing for her daughter in 2001.

But the 34-year-old's new sentence was ordered on a second-degree murder conviction and includes the possibility of parole in less than 10 years, accounting for five years already served.

Colleran had appealed her 2003 first-degree murder conviction to the state Supreme Judicial

Court, which ruled in October that there was no premeditation involved in the killing. The court ruled that the girl's death resulted from Colleran's depression.

http://wbztv.com/local/mom.smothers.girl.2.923345.html

 

[OfficerObie59]

the "interests of justice"

i.e. we can't articulate why, so it's just in the interest of justice.

 

[fra444]

She should be in jail for as long as that 2yo could have possibly lived. I'm thinking 60-70 years! Her being eligible for parole in a total of 15 years is sickening!

 

[8MORE]

Interests for justce for who?