Moira Akers: A woman who killed her baby sentenced 30 years in jail
In 2018, a woman from Maryland was on trial for suffocating her newborn son and putting the body in a Ziploc bag.
In April of this year, a jury in Howard County, Maryland, found 41-year-old Moira Akers guilty of first-degree child abuse and second-degree murder in the death of her newborn. She could have been sent to prison for life, but Judge Timothy J. McCrone of the Howard County Circuit Court gave her a sentence of 30 years instead.
After Akers gave birth in November 2018, the terrible thing happened. After the unnamed boy was born, she called for help and was taken to a nearby hospital. But it looked like she was going to hide the birth, at least until the doctors and nurses at Howard County stepped in.
In a press release, the Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office said, “Akers did not tell the Howard County Fire & EMS workers who came to help her while she was being taken to the hospital that her baby had just been born.” During the investigation, it was found that Akers had just given birth in her home. When the police went to the house to check on the people who lived there, they found a dead baby boy wrapped in a blanket and in a plastic bag inside a closed closet. When asked how the baby was found, Akers said, “The baby was dead when it was born.”
On November 2, 2018, the autopsy was done.
In March 2019, a report from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said that the boy was not stillborn. Instead, the prosecution said that the boy was “healthy, full-term, and alive when he was born.” The autopsy showed that the child died from being suffocated and left out in the cold.
WJZ-TV, a CBS station in Baltimore, said that police said they found proof that Akers looked up information online about how to end a pregnancy. During the trial, however, the woman said that her child had never lived. But the jury didn’t think that was a good enough reason.
State’s attorney Rich Gibson talked about the details of the case in comments that were made public when Akers was found guilty. “We had to show that the baby was born alive, which was one of the hardest things my office has ever had to do,” he said. “Thanks to the hard work of HCPD detectives, our prosecutors, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and other experts, we were able to show a jury that Ms. Akers’ horrible and wrong actions led to the death of her own child,” said the prosecutor.
According to a recent press release from the State’s Attorney’s Office, the case was handled by Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Jennifer W. Ritter and Chief of the Special Victims Unit Mary V. Murphy.
