[2] Her husband squandered the inheritance, forcing her to find seasonal work as a crop-picker and vegetable grower; consequently, the family lived in "a visible state of poverty and ill health".
[5] A week after the trial, Smith made a confession to the prison chaplain in which she admitted using rat poison to kill seven of her other children.
[5] The press and general public were heavily in favour of her execution despite infanticide usually being viewed as less repellent than standard murder and thus less deserving of capital punishment.
Factors that were atypical (and thus weighed against her) included the premeditated nature of the act and its apparent brutality – poisoning was considered much more cruel than the more common methods of drowning or smothering.
[6] As an older married woman, she was also viewed with less sympathy than younger women who gave birth out of wedlock and killed their babies to avoid social stigma.