[1] It was alleged that in a moment of maternal madness, Anna Flannagan had killed the child, although she was later lucid enough to be arrested on attempting to flee to Sydney, Australia.
[6] However, given the social stigma attached to illegitimacy during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the leniency meted out to perceived 'spontaneous' infanticide cases born of wretched parental circumstances such as poverty, lone parenting, family violence, and other contextual factors, Bronwyn Daley has suggested that capital cases of infanticide carried out by mothers were usually mitigated to life imprisonment after appeal to higher judicial authorities or, in this case, Ministers of the Crown and the Governor-General himself [7] As William Onslow noted in his official record of the appeal for clemency in this instance, there was also widespread public aversion to use of capital punishment in New Zealand when it came to culpable women, given that Minnie Dean (1895) was the only woman executed in New Zealand criminal history until capital punishment was abolished in 1961.
The newspaper accounts also recorded the subsequent determination that Anna Flannagan was experiencing mental illness and needed to be admitted to Sunnyside Hospital from Lyttelton Gaol in 1892, as well as that of the appeal to William Onslow, 4th Earl of Onslow (the Governor-General of New Zealand) for clemency in parliamentary official records, and a subsequent petition that requested the release of Anna Flannagan from Sunnyside in 1894.
According to Bronwyn Dalley's analysis of late-19th and early-20th-century New Zealand infanticide cases, Anna was released from Sunnyside custody in 1895 and her mother from Terrace Gaol in 1906.
Indeed, as the Wellington Evening Post commented, there had been widespread outrage when the original sentence of capital punishment in New Zealand had been commuted to imprisonment after Flannagan had been found guilty of murder.