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Neonaticide: "It Can Happen in Anyone's Community"

Chion Wolf
/
WNPR
Panna Krom

A Connecticut woman who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for killing her newborn baby is speaking out about the state’s Safe Havens Law. 

Panna Krom, who was just 17 when she went to York Correctional Institute, was released last month after serving almost 10 years. Her sentence is one of the longest ever handed down for the crime. 

She appeared recently on The Colin McEnroe Show.

The daughter of Cambodian refugees in Danbury, as a high school student she hid her pregnancy from her family and friends, and gave birth alone in a bathroom.

"I grew up in a strict household. I grew up in a strict culture," she said on the show. "I was very much in denial. I isolated myself because I felt very alone, and I knew that what I had done was very irresponsible. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t ask for help," she said of her pregnancy. "Because I felt no one would understand me."

Doug Hood advocated for Panna Krom to be given clemency and released from prison early.

He said sometimes it can be hard for people to understand the circumstances of young mothers who are driven to kill newborns.

“She was under this immense pressure,” he said. “Young, naïve girl, and not only did she not have her family’s support, the school knew about it, and kind of let her down. The boyfriend threatened her; she had nowhere to turn, and she was really trapped.”

Hood highlighted what he called the extraordinary length of the sentence. He researched five other comparable cases in Connecticut of teenage mothers driven to kill their babies. Two were never charged, and one received a suspended sentence. Of the two others given jail time, one was sentenced to seven months, and the other to 18 months.

Hood said most of the girls involved in other cases came from upper-middle-class families.

“It largely comes down to the prosecutor and the judge and your resources, whether you’ve got a lawyer with you when you’re arrested,” he said. “When a lawyer picked up her case, they had a signed confession.”

Once at York, Krom was placed in protective custody for the first two years of her sentence, but eventually integrated into the general prison population.

“Prison itself was very daunting. The thing I missed out on the most was being with my family,” she said. “I met some of the most genuine women behind bars. They just took me for who I was, and I reciprocated the same to them.”

Krom was released on September 30, just a few months short of serving ten years in prison.

She has now joined the Safe Havens working group at the Capitol, and said she feels passionately about spreading the word. The law allows any new mother who is in distress to drop her baby anonymously at a hospital emergency room.

“The Safe Havens law absolutely would have turned this story around,” she said. “I needed to get my message across to the younger audience, and I just needed to tell them, and connect with them, and let them know there are options out there that I didn’t know about. And that it can happen in anyone’s community.”

Use of the Safe Havens law is relatively rare. Since it was passed 16 years ago, some 27 babies have been given up.

Harriet Jones is Managing Editor for Connecticut Public Radio, overseeing the coverage of daily stories from our busy newsroom.

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