BY: CHRIS BLANKINSHIP, ESQ.

By now, the story of Shaquan Duley admitting to killing her two year and 18 month old chilren is infamous. Duley has admitted to strangling her boys, placing them in car seats, and then dumping the car into a river. Many have made the grim comparison to the 1995 Susan Smith murders involving a mom who let her car sink into a lake carrying her two sleeping sons. However, I believe a comparison to the Andrea Yates murders – the woman who confessed to murdering her five children by drowning them in a bathtub in 2001, is more appropriate for reasons that will come up in Duley’s defense.

Duley has already been charged with two counts of murder as defined by South Carolina. Under their Code of Laws, Section 16-3-10, “murder” is defined as “…the killing of any person with malice aforethought, either express or implied.” Acting with malice aforethought simply means Duley must have planned the killings in order to be guilty of murder. If she acted with negligence or under the heat of passion, the crime would be some lesser offense.

To me, there is no doubt Duley planned to kill her children. She took her boys to a motel room and strangled each in turn with her hands. Her attorney Carl B. Grant has requested the public “keep an open mind,” but that’s not realistic.

In South Carolina, if a person is convicted of murder, the judge will hold a separate sentencing proceeding to determine whether the punishment should be death or life imprisonment. In a sentencing proceeding, the court will review both aggravating and mitigating circumstances. Unfortunately for Ms. Duley, the statutory circumstances both weigh for, and against her.

I have combed through the aggravating circumstances a South Carolina judge must consider during a murder sentencing proceeding and the following are applicable to Duley: Whether the murder included physical torture, whether the murder was of two or more people during the same scheme or course of conduct, and whether children were murdered. Torture was included in this list because it’s arguable that dying by suffocation and watching your brother’s murder rises to the level of torture. It’s honestly hard to imagine much worse.

The primary mitigating circumstances available for Duley as statutorily outlined is whether “[t]he capacity of the [Duley] to appreciate the criminality of h[er] conduct or to conform h[er] conduct to the requirements of law was substantially impaired.” Now here’s where the similarities to the Yates trial are crucial for Duley’s defense. If Duley can prove this mitigating circumstance, she may be able to avoid prison in favor of a mental health facility just as Yates did almost a decade ago. If Duley is unable to prove this circumstance, she faces the death penalty or a minimum 30 year prison sentence. I believe the crucial piece of evidence will be the fact that just like Yates, Duley killed her boys using her own hands. She struggled with each child as they fought for life, and committed this atrocity twice.

The media has been reporting on external circumstances that lead to Duley’s current situation. She comes from poverty, she has an abusive mother, and she’s very young but already has three kids. For me, all I need to hear is the method Duley used to kill her kids to know she’s not mentally healthy. Local Sheriff Larry Williams has stated “I think she was fed up with her mother telling her she couldn’t take care of the children, or she wasn’t taking care of the children and just wanted to be free.” I guess I’m having trouble understanding how a yearning for freedom motivates a mother to kill her sons.

While it’s impossible to defend Duley’s actions, it’s useful to try and understand what really caused her to commit the crimes. If some mental defect prevented her from appreciating the criminality of her actions, can society truly hold her liable for her crimes and still claim justice has been served?