LEBANON, Ohio (AP) — A young Ohio mother who prosecutors said killed and buried her unwanted newborn in her backyard just days after her senior prom so that she could keep her “perfect life” was acquitted of murder Thursday.

Brooke Skylar Richardson, now 20, began shaking and sobbing while a judge read the not guilty verdicts on aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment charges.

She had faced up to life in prison if she had been convicted on the most serious charge. boston.com

This case caught my attention because it exemplifies the allowable psychopathy that american feminism has carved out for white womanhood. The access to class mobility, privilege, and power combined with some vestiges of oppression based on DNA that most of the rest of women on earth are subject to in more extreme conditions can create some of the worst sociopaths who, with the ideal packaging, remain unsuspected and loose to wreak havoc on the vulnerable. Brooke Skylar Richardson is a prime example of this to my mind, and the fact that she ended up in the media with full use of her three names like so many notorious killers who preceded her is fitting — maybe her innocent daughter who may or may not have been able to draw a breath before Richardson disposed of her in her backyard without notifying anyone else on earth will not have died in vain if only for that fact, to put her where she actually belongs in the historical record.

Instead, she might be serving a year for something that should be considered a crime in any epoch, but particularly in this one where children are bandied about on social media as accessories, disposable once they display that they are independent beings who are more than just status symbols. One in which cannibalism is being normalized. One in which those with close ties to the powerful, but want to be closer, sell their children to the highest bidder for fame and riches and whatever sex games their handlers want to use them for.

Richardson’s mother took her to see a gynecologist so she could obtain birth control, so it’s not as if the fact she had a sex life in her teens was a shameful thing to her family. No matter the selfishness of her mother apparent in the police interrogation room, preventative care was always an option for someone like her. Her father did not appear to be upset by the fact his daughter was sexually active. Such care was easily within reach, she was informed. But she didn’t want to do that. The people she learned to model her psychopathy on probably had an inkling something was off, but didn’t care enough for their status symbol of a daughter.

Everything her lawyers offered to acquit her of murder, and she did receive a stellar defense, not so ironically offered as much proof as why she chose to do something so callous and cruel. Even if we buy the weak case the prosecution predictably put on for this petite blond darling, that she endured unbearable birth pain in silence before unceremoniously burying another being she herself carried in an unmarked spot in her parent’s backyard, it speaks to her guilt as well, not to some caring nature the defense called character witnesses to highlight, to someone so timid and naive about pregnancy. It proves the constructed narrative of white victimhood, but these facts are never on trial. There is one law book for the light complexioned and class mobile and another for the darker and actually victimized.

While professional defense and prosecution witnesses discussed the baby, Annabelle, — whom the latter didn’t bother to provide more direct evidence to prove if she was stillborn or not — in the more clinical term of fetus, the former preferred to use the name that Richardson had given her throughout the trial. The humanization of the victim in this case was advantageous to her defense. Forensic science has advanced to a stage at which cremated remains can be tested for death by poisoning, but after a botched determination of attempted cremation of some sort by the coroner’s office, the state apparently gave up on offering further evidence of her crime.

It is curious, isn’t it, that a high-profile trial promoted by multiple courtroom television outlets would feature such seemingly inept prosecutors who yet appeared so serious and capable on screen. But they supposedly banked on the circumstantial evidence: Richardson had no prenatal plans before fortuitously producing a stillborn fetus named Annabelle as the defense had it — what would she have done if the baby had been perfectly healthy? We don’t know that it wasn’t, they said. Two people on earth did, and the one in the losing position had no way of making that known; we’re to take the word of the one who won, who boasted about her tummy returning to normal the day after she miraculously birthed a baby on her own, in the dark, in silence, in a bathroom in the same house in which the would-be grandparents did not have a whiff of the goings on about their daughter’s perfectly concealed full-term pregnancy, and who didn’t appear to need emergency aftercare.

I and many other women can attest to the fact about how freeing it is to rid oneself of an unwanted pregnancy as Richardson displayed soon after, but we haven’t been under suspicion for murdering our offspring. The public doesn’t often want to hear that about what safe abortion can mean for women in so many ways. But an Ohio jury was perfectly fine with saying that this months-long premeditation of child endangerment and likely murder was not a factor in their judgment of abuse of a corpse and a sector of the public following this was either traumatized in part or validated for all the wrong reasons.