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Brooke Skylar Richardson, who gave birth in secret in May 2017, has been found not guilty after allegedly ending the life of, and burying her newborn.
Richardson, who is 20, would have faced life in prison if convicted on all charges. After deliberating for around four hours, a jury turned in the verdict.
Richardson was charged with a number of crimes, including child endangerment. The judge threw out a charge for tampering with evidence.
After deliberation, the jury found her not guilty of the most serious charges leveled against her.
In May 2017, Richardson gave birth to a baby girl she named Annabelle. Her family was unaware that she was pregnant, saying that her weight fluctuated so often that it was hard to tell what changes she was undergoing. According to Richardson, she gave birth in the family’s upstairs bathroom and kept the situation hidden from her family. She alleges that the child was stillborn.
According to prosecutors, it was too convenient that Richardson gave birth to a stillborn, as this would make it easy for her to maintain the illusion of her perfect life. Richardson tearfully confessed to burying the baby in the backyard to her gynecologist two months after the fact, which opened the investigation and eventual court case.
Richardson’s defense came down to testimony from a psychologist who treated her when she was a child, telling the jury that she was abused as a child, which led to a number of personality complexes. Richardson suffered from anorexia and had constantly shifting weight.
The defense took pains to humanize her before the jury, attempting the reframe the abjectly horrifying facts of the case.
A focal point of the defense was that the baby was stillborn and that Richardson committed no crime in hiding the baby from her family and burying it in secret.
Richardson was found not guilty on most of the charges leveled against her. If she’d been found guilty of them, she would have faced up to life in prison.
However, she was only found guilty of charges that carry a minimum sentence of six months. Richardson became tearful and emotional when the verdicts were read.
