An appellate court has rejected the appeal of a Sevier County woman who claimed she did not know she was pregnant and — in a state of shock — smothered her baby girl after giving birth in a bathroom.
The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals late last week upheld both the reckless homicide conviction a Sevier County jury served up in the case of Stephanie Marie Brown and the four-year prison term meted out by a Sevier County judge.
Brown was 24 when, in January 2016, she gave birth to a baby girl in the bathroom of her boyfriend’s parents’ home in Kodak.
Court records show she initially insisted she had no idea she was pregnant and that her daughter was born already dead.
But, records show, she later confessed she began to suspect she was pregnant in the weeks before the bathroom birthing and clamped her hand over the infant’s mouth and nose immediately after the birth.
Sevier County Public Defender Ed Miller argued in the appeal that Brown was in a state of shock and should not have been held criminally responsible for her actions.
The appellate court, however, disagreed.
“(Brown) contends that she was in shock. … However, there was no testimony that Defendant was in such a state (of) shock after giving birth that she could not appreciate that holding her hand over the baby’s mouth and nose immediately after birth would suffocate the child and cause death,” the court’s opinion stated.
“(Brown) was the victim’s mother and did not disclose her pregnancy to the victim’s father or anyone else until after she gave birth and had killed the victim,” Appellate Judge Thomas T. Woodall wrote in the opinion.
The ruling means Brown, who has been free on bond pending appeal, is now headed to prison — unless Miller can coax the Tennessee Supreme Court into considering the case.
“Mr. Laws testified that approximately one to one and a half months before Defendant gave birth, he ‘jokingly’ asked her if she was pregnant, and she said no,” the appellate opinion stated. “He noticed that Defendant had gained a little weight, and she told him that she thought she had a hernia.”
According to the opinion, Brown also told her mother she believed she had a hernia. Her mother offered to take her to the hospital, but Brown declined.
On the night of Jan. 13, 2016, Brown told Laws she was feeling sick and may have suffered food poisoning. Laws and his parents would later testify Brown went into the bathroom and stayed there. Laws fell asleep. When a barking dog awakened him around 12:30 a.m., Laws realized Brown was still in the bathroom, the opinion stated.
“Mr. Laws testified that he laid back down in the bed, and (Brown) walked out of the bathroom and into the bedroom,” the opinion stated. “He said that (Brown) told him that she had just given birth to a stillborn baby, later determined to be a girl.”
Laws told jurors he jumped to his feet and grabbed his car keys.
“And I said, ‘We need to go to the hospital.’ And she kind of just stood there,” Laws testified. “I don’t know if she was in shock or what. She had this, like, vague look on her face like she was there physically but not, like, mentally there.
“And I was like, I said, ‘We need to go. We need to go to the hospital now,’ ” he continued. “And I said, ‘Get some clothes on.’ And she starts like, she slowly starts getting her clothes, and I guess she was, must have been, still in shock or something. And after that, it’s kind of a little blurry.”
Laws’ mother and father looked inside the bathroom and saw the baby — now dead — in a trash bag. The couple said the bathroom appeared to have been cleaned.
“(Laws’ mother) opened the bag and found the baby underneath some towels,” the opinion stated. “She attempted to resuscitate the baby by doing chest compressions with her two fingers but she stopped after the baby did not respond. (Laws’ mother) testified that she then hugged (Brown).”
The couple placed the baby in a cardboard box.
“(Laws’ father) said that they considered whether to drive the baby to the hospital or wait for an ambulance but they chose to drive her to the hospital,” the opinion stated. “(Laws’ father) noted that they decided to place the baby in a box so that no one else would see her when they took her into the hospital.”
Upon arrival at Leconte Medical Center in Sevierville, the couple handed the box to a nurse, who immediately burst into tears at the sight.
“Mom, I’m at the hospital,” Brown wrote to her mother in a text. “The strangest thing happened last night. I delivered a dead baby.”
But Maria Cutshaw, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent working as a detective for the Sevier County Sheriff's Office at the time, was suspicious of Brown’s claim the baby was born dead.
Brown had told her boyfriend’s mother she was “nervous about going to jail” because she had used her phone to look up “baby stuff.” She told nurses she cleaned the bathroom because it “looked like a crime scene.”
After an autopsy revealed evidence the baby had, in fact, been alive when born, Cutshaw sat down with Brown for another interview in March 2016, the opinion stated.
“(Brown) eventually admitted that she realized her pregnancy a few weeks before giving birth,” the opinion stated. “She then admitted that she killed her newborn baby by placing her hand over the baby’s mouth and nose a few minutes after she was born.
“(Brown) said that the baby had moved a little and had moved her arm,” the opinion continued. “She told Detective Cutshaw that she did not know why she stopped covering the baby’s mouth, but after a few minutes she checked the baby’s pulse and found none.”
Brown was charged with first-degree murder. At trial, Miller sought to convince jurors the autopsy was wrong and Brown’s confession was false. The jury ultimately acquitted Brown of premeditated murder and instead deemed her guilty of reckless homicide.
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