This post contains themes of stillbirth and may be triggering for some readers.
Amanda Kimbrough is only 35 years old, but she is resigned to spending her foreseeable future in a grim Alabama prison.
Her crime? She didn’t stab anyone. She’s not guilty of sexual assault. It’s not arson, drug trafficking or abduction.
Instead, she’s been jailed over the stillbirth of her son Timmy.
That outcome sounds outrageous, and in many senses it is.
The case is far from cut and dry, though, because Kimbrough has admitted to having taken the drug methamphetamine during her pregnancy.
“I don’t even know why I done it,” she told the New York Times of her decision to take meth on that single occasion. “I guess the Devil knocked on my shoulder that day.”
At just 25 weeks into her pregnancy, she went into Labor. Her son Timmy was eventually born on April 2008, but he was not breathing, and his body was blue.
The tiny boy was pronounced dead less than 20 minutes later, before Kimbrough ever heard her son’s cry.
A drug test after Timmy’s death showed that Kimbrough, a former drug addict, had meth in her system.
She was arrested, and her two daughters — both of who were born prematurely, too — were removed from her care.
In September 2008, she was charged with a crime called “chemical endangerment,” an offence equivalent to murder that was introduced in 2008 to protect babies from meth labs, but was never originally meant to apply to the actions of pregnant women, The Guardian reports.
State prosecutors aggressively pursued the case against her, and — facing the possibility of a life sentence if she was found guilty — Kimbrough decided to plead guilty instead.
She was sentenced to 10 years behind bars, and remains there to this day.
The desperate mother appealed to the highest level of the Alabama court system.
But troublingly, the judges ruled that the word “child” in the chemical endangerment law could be applied to unborn foetuses from the moment of conception — a finding that continues to concern pro-choice advocates, because it leaves pregnant women vulnerable to prosecution.
Controversially, authorities also chose to ignore that fact that Kimbrough’s obstetrician had diagnosed “occult cord prolapse” following Timmy’s death; that is, the umbilical cord had descended through the birth canal before Timmy, cutting off blood flow.
So it’s not entirely clear that drug use was the cause of Timmy’s death, after all.
Today, Kimbrough lives in the notoriously rough Tutwiler women’s prison in Alabama, while her daughters grow up in the outside world without their mum.
Kimbrough still thinks of Timmy every day, she told The Guardian in a series of devastating letters.
“Tim Jr would be six years old [today]and not a day goes by I don’t think of him,” she wrote last year in a heartbreaking note excerpt published by The Guardian.
“While I was out we keep his grave decorated and kept up, my husband and family do while I’m here.”
She added that she will never forgive herself for Timmy’s death.
“I’ll always blame myself,” she wrote.
