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 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. There are few other resources available to contemporary scrutiny, other than contemporary newspaper records of the trial, the sentence and its commutation to life imprisonment. 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. Thereafter, there is no further information about the lives of Anna and Sarah Jane Flannagan after their respective releases from incarceration. In recent assessment of the case, Alison Clarke commented that the case of the Flannagans did not attract considerable public sympathy due to the perceived brutality of the purported offence, the greater age of Anna Flannagan (25) and that this had not been her first pregnancy. Thus, she was perceived as being in a different existential and moral context from younger single women who were perceived as being 'seduced and abandoned' by unscrupulous and negligent older men or irresponsible male contemporaries. 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. Clarke suggests that this may have influenced the later death penalty meted out to baby farmer Minnie Dean in 1895, who was the only woman executed in New Zealand criminal history until the abolition of capital punishment in New Zealand in 1951. See also Caroline Whitting, also convicted of child murder and