Woman sentenced to 10 years in 1998 infant death

By JAMES MacPHERSON, Associated Press
BISMARCK — A federal judge, choked with emotion, sentenced a woman Monday to 10 years in prison for leaving her newborn son alone for about two weeks to die, then putting his body in a suitcase in a ditch near her home.


    Dana Deegan, 35, of White Shield, had pleaded guilty to a second-degree murder charge in December. She admitted to abandoning her son in her Mandaree home shortly after giving birth in 1998, then putting his body in a suitcase and leaving it in a nearby ditch on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Authorities said the child died of starvation and dehydration.


    Deegan tearfully asked U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland on Monday for leniency, saying she wanted to continue taking care of her three daughters, who were between the ages of 1 and 5 at the time her son was born.


    ‘‘Please allow me to continue my work as a mother to my children,’’ she pleaded.


    Hovland appeared misty-eyed as he handed down the sentence recommended by prosecutors.


    ‘‘I have spent many, many days and nights thinking about this case,’’ the judge told Deegan. ‘‘I, unfortunately, feel obligated to impose the sentence I did ... but I wish you only the best.’’


    He called the case ‘‘probably one of the saddest tragedies that I have seen.’’


    Two years ago, Hovland sentenced Deegan’s brother-in-law to 18 years in prison for killing her brother. Hovland said he was sympathetic to her lifelong history as a victim of abuse.


    ‘‘I know you have not had an easy life,’’ he said.


    Deegan’s court-appointed attorney, Bill Schmidt, asked the judge to consider sentencing Deegan to probation.


    ‘‘Compassion is appropriate,’’ Schmidt told the judge. He said a lengthy jail sentence would ‘‘compound the tragedy.’’


    Schmidt said Deegan had never been in trouble with the law before and could not commit the same crime again. A defense witness said she has had a tubal ligation, leaving her incapable of having children.


    Assistant U.S. Attorney Clare Hochhalter recommended Deegan serve 10 years in prison. She must report to federal authorities May 30 to begin serving her sentence.


    Hochhalter and U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley said after the trial that the sentence helped bring justice to the child.


    ‘‘That baby had every right to life as do her other children now,’’ Wrigley said. He disputed Schmidt’s contention that Deegan was both a victim and a perpetrator.


    ‘‘He only had it half right,’’ Wrigley said. ‘‘Dana Deegan was not a victim.’’


    The child’s body was found in a suitcase in a ditch in November 1999 by a rancher repairing fences north of Mandaree. Prosecutors said the baby was dressed in a one-piece sleeper and socks, wrapped in a blanket and towel and placed in a plastic bag.


    Deegan discarded the baby’s body just 50 yards from her home, prosecutors said.


    The child became known as ‘‘Baby Moses,’’ and community members paid burial expenses.


    Authorities eventually identified his mother through DNA testing. Deegan volunteered a DNA sample to the FBI in 2004.


    The FBI said Deegan’s connection was first suspected by a tribal investigator based on where the baby’s body was discovered.


    Deegan had said she hid her pregnancy from her family, including the father of her three children, for nine months.


    Before her sentencing Monday, her attorney showed a DVD that featured interviews with Deegan’s children and one of her sisters. Deegan’s three daughters and her sister said she is a good mother, and asked the judge for leniency.


    A defense expert, psychiatrist Phillip Resnick of Cleveland, testified that Deegan had been sexually and emotionally abused as a child and as an adult and suffered from severe depression, factors he said contributed to the baby’s death.


    Resnick, a psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, met with Deegan for six hours in Cleveland in March. He said he has been studying women who kill their children since 1969, and coined the term ‘‘neonaticide,’’ or the killing of a baby on the day of birth.


    Women who kill their babies immediately after giving birth often don’t plan on killing the baby or even caring for it, Resnick said. ‘‘They just put it out of their mind,’’ he said.


    Deegan, who gave birth in the shower while her children were home, fit the description, he said.


    ‘‘She was unable to rationally develop a plan of what to do with that baby,’’ Resnick said. ‘‘She felt overwhelmed.’’


    Deegan said in court she did not know why she killed her newborn son.


    ‘‘I wish I could explain why I did what I did,’’ she said.


    Wrigley did not agree with Renick’s assessment or labeling what Deegan did as ‘‘neonaticide.’’


    ‘‘It’s called homicide,’’ Wrigley said. ‘‘She knew full well what the consequences would be.’’