I can't help but be cynical and wonder if the mothers in these cases knew that if they blamed it on the god and/or devil they'd probably get away with it, and not because they really felt like they were under that influence at the time of the murder.

Obviously you'd need to be a religious nut in the first place for such a defence to work, though.

 

I don't think that's very likely. I mean what, they killed their own children in gruesome fashion for some other reason, and then thought up the religious mania thing to get "not guilty by reason of insanity" instead of prison?

All 3 of the examples in this post confessed to their crimes, and 2 of them called the police themselves, while the other confessed to a child care worker and was found rocking with her dead baby while listening to religious hymns. It's not as if they were mafia dons who found Jesus and pretended delusions to try to beat the rap.

 

Some other reason like they were sick of their own life, wanted to get back at their controlling husband, turned out motherhood wasn't all it was cracked up to be, etc.

I'm not saying they maliciously killed their kids and then came up with a religious excuse, I'm suggesting that they killed their kid for some other reason/impulse, and are then using the 'safe' religious impulse as an excuse to get off on the crime.

We've just had a very high-profile murder case in NZ about Clayton Weatherston (quick google should give you more info), where he stabbed his girlfriend 216 times with scissors and a knife. He admitted manslaughter, but denied murder, attempting to use NZ's "provocation" defence. He was found guilty of murder by the jury. I'm basically saying it's a similar case here - these mothers murdered their kids for who knows what reason, and fell back on the religious impulse excuse as the most likely one to get them off their charges, regardless if that's really what happened at the time of the killing or not.