Madras HC takes pity on woman who killed daughters after taunts | India News

CHENNAI: In a rare gesture, Madras high court took pity on a mother, who drank poison and gave it to her two girls, and set aside three-year jail term awarded to her by a trial court. While she survived, the kids died. On July 22, 2016, Sathiya, a mother of three girls, poisoned her three-year-old second daughter and 1.5-month-old third daughter also, “unable to bear the taunt of society that she was an unfortunate woman to bear only female children”. During the trial she delivered a fourth daughter.
Justice D Bharatha Chakravarthy, invoking the ‘Nalla Thangal Syndrome’ or the Battered Woman Syndrome, said: “It is a matter of great pain that being a mother, the petitioner should feel ashamed for giving birth to girls and would attempt to commit suicide and to kill the kids.” The judge, however, made Sathiya to sign a bond giving a written undertaking to the HC that she’d educate the remaining two girls at least upto graduation level.