Experts encourage parents to share a room with their babies, but not the same bed. (Representational)
The Maryland woman had just wrapped up a virtual happy hour on Facebook, drinking a couple beers on the porch while her infant daughter and 4-year-old slept. She changed the baby's diaper, pumped breastmilk, took out the trash and locked the doors before climbing into bed next to her baby girl.
By morning, Muriel Morrison's daughter was listless, her lips blue. Morrison was charged and convicted by a jury in the co-sleeping death of her infant, who suffocated while she slept beside her mother.
Maryland's highest court this week threw out Morrison's 2013 conviction and 20-year sentence. The decision divided the Maryland Court of Appeals along gender lines, with the all-female majority ruling that there was not enough evidence to find that Morrison was "grossly negligent." The judges were not prepared to criminalize co-sleeping with an infant.
"Co-sleeping with a four-month old after consuming beer does not necessarily pose such an inherent risk of death or serious physical harm," wrote Judge Michele D. Hotten, who was joined by Chief Judge Mary Ellen Barbera and Judges Shirley M. Watts and Brynja M. Booth.
Although the government introduced evidence that the safest way for a baby to sleep is alone in a crib or bassinet, affirming Morrison's conviction "would potentially have a disparate effect on women in general, and indeed women of color and women of limited socioeconomic means," Watts wrote in a concurring opinion.
"Certainly anyone who co-slept with a baby under circumstances similar to those in this case would be at risk for conviction on insufficient evidence in any jurisdiction in the State."
Morrison's case in Baltimore, which began after a virtual "moms' night out" in September 2013, came long before the coronavirus pandemic, stay-at-home orders and subsequent explosion of online happy hours. But the legal battle over the actions of the mother of a newborn socializing online resonates and revives the fraught debate over co-sleeping.
There are about 3,500 sleep-related deaths of babies in the United States each year, including from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), accidental suffocation and deaths from unknown causes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages parents to share a room with their babies, but not the same bed. A decade ago, Baltimore health officials began promoting safe sleeping practices with new parents to reduce infant deaths, with the message that infants should sleep alone.
But the practice of co-sleeping is popular, with more than half of mothers - or 61.4 percent - reporting having shared a bed with their babies in a CDC survey.
Linda C. Fentiman, who has taught criminal and health law at Pace University's law school, said it is not common for parents to be prosecuted in co-sleeping deaths. When jurors, judges and prosecutors assess risk and try to answer the question of what a reasonable person should have done, Fentiman said her research shows that they bring an unconscious bias and tend to hold mothers to a different standard.
"People expect women to be more careful, and the 'reasonable mother' ends up being pretty close to Mother Teresa," she said.
The court majority was concerned about "the unfairness of sending (Morrison) to prison given that it wasn't a clear risk."
The dissenting judges in the case agreed that co-sleeping with an infant is not inherently dangerous. But the combination of drinking to the point of "serious impairment," they said, "creates a substantial risk that the parent will suffocate the infant."
It is not the court's role, the dissent said, to second-guess the jury and its conclusion that Morrison drank to the point of "serious impairment" before getting into bed with her infant, and 4-year-old daughter on her other side.
"We are constrained to conclude that a rational juror could have found that Ms. Morrison went to bed seriously impaired by alcohol and that she therefore was grossly negligent by not sleeping somewhere other than next to (her infant) that night," wrote Judge Jonathan Biran, who was joined by Judges Robert N. McDonald and Joseph M. Getty.
At her three-day trial in 2016, Morrison testified that she drank two 12-ounce beers and about half of a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor during the virtual happy hour to celebrate the start of the upcoming school year with her friends in Virginia.
Her older daughter, who was 4 at the time and 7 when she testified at her mother's trial, said her mother had rolled on top of her baby sister. She tried unsuccessfully to wake Morrison, who was in a "deep, deep sleep," her daughter testified.
Prosecutors argued that Morrison engaged in a practice that had been proven to be dangerous and had drank enough alcohol to effectively "pass out."
But Morrison told the court that co-sleeping was a tradition in her family. She shared a bed with her mother as a child, her mother had done the same with her grandmother, and Morrison had done so with each of her five older children, as did many of the other mothers she knew.
The jury convicted Morrison of involuntary manslaughter. She received a 20-year sentence that was suspended by the trial court, and she was put on probation. Her conviction for child neglect was upheld.
The office of Attorney General Brian Frosh declined to comment Thursday on the ruling.
Morrison's attorney Haley Licha, an assistant public defender, said the court majority was concerned about opening the door to prosecuting parents for accidental injuries to their children.
"When an accident takes the life of a child in their parents' care, do we need to punish that parent or is there a better way to handle it?"
Morrison, now 48, was devastated, Licha said, and "is going to be blaming herself for this forever, but that doesn't make it a crime."
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)