Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code

Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code sets out a mental-incapacity defense that can exempt a person from criminal responsibility. In Alice Espanet’s case, it became the legal basis her defense identified for seeking acquittal, focusing the trial on whether a psychological disorder had impaired her capacity to understand the unlawfulness of her actions or to act in accordance with that understanding.

The statutory test

The provision applies when, at the time of an offense, a psychological anomaly or disorder leaves a person unable to understand that the act is unlawful or unable to act according to that understanding. Its test therefore concerns a person’s capacities at the time of the offense, rather than treating a diagnosis alone as automatically decisive. Carmela Basaguren, Alice’s lawyer, cited the article in an early application to the investigating judge and signaled that the defense would seek acquittal on grounds of mental incapacity.

The article appeared in the defense’s argument for Alice’s release from pretrial detention as well as in its anticipated case at trial. These were distinct questions: the initial filing asked the judge to end provisional imprisonment, while the defense’s stated longer-term position was that Alice should be acquitted under the mental-incapacity exemption. The prosecution opposed release, emphasizing the gravity of the two murder charges and the potential sentence. The judge nevertheless ordered Alice released on bail, with her passport withdrawn and a requirement to report to court every fifteen days.

The dispute over diagnosis and evidence

At trial, a Belgian psychiatrist’s assessment of postpartum psychosis was challenged on evidentiary grounds. The prosecutor established that there was no official diagnosis and that the psychiatrist’s view rested on Alice’s reported experience and her conduct. He confirmed that these were the grounds for his assessment, asking what else could be required; most of the jurors appeared to accept his answer.

Two psychiatrists who had examined Alice at the investigating judge’s request offered a sharply different view. They said they had found no sign of postpartum psychosis or even depression, and argued that postpartum psychosis occurred in the weeks immediately following childbirth, not ten months later. Their testimony made timing central to the dispute: the question was not simply whether such a condition exists, but whether it could explain Alice’s mental state at the relevant time.

The experts also described other infanticide cases in which psychosis had been certified. Carmela Basaguren objected that these examples did not address her client’s case. The witnesses then presented information about the Beck Depression Inventory and the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, followed by a list of Alice’s psychological characteristics. Their impersonal presentation lost the jury’s attention. One expert departed from the prepared account, distinguishing a disorder from a person’s character and saying that someone could do harm and then live peacefully with it. The testimony left the jury with competing ways to interpret Alice’s conduct: as evidence of illness, or as evidence of character.

The jury and the legal outcome

The article’s importance in the case lies in the distinction it makes between mental illness as a diagnosis and incapacity as a legal threshold. The trial testimony did not settle that distinction through a single uncontested medical finding. Instead, jurors heard a psychiatrist defend his assessment by pointing to Alice’s account and behavior, while other experts disputed both the diagnosis and its timing. Their response to the Belgian psychiatrist suggested that this form of evidence could be persuasive even without an official diagnosis; the later testimony demonstrated how uncertain and contested its interpretation remained.

The post-verdict account states that the judge, following the jury’s decision, replaced imprisonment with psychiatric treatment and chose outpatient care rather than commitment to a psychiatric institution. The article thus forms part of the legal framework through which the case’s competing medical and criminal narratives could have consequences for responsibility and punishment. The available account does not describe the final order as a simple consequence of diagnosis alone: it also records a judicial choice of treatment setting and the practical considerations offered in support of outpatient treatment.

Infanticide and the limits of separate legal categories

The book places this mental-incapacity defense beside the history of laws that treated infanticide as a distinct offense. It recounts how Queen Victoria intervened to prevent women convicted of infanticide from receiving the death penalty, and notes that Spain recognized infanticide as separate from homicide from 1822 until the Criminal Code of 1995 abolished the separate offense. Earlier Spanish law connected the lesser category to a mother’s effort to conceal her dishonor; later proposals instead referred to emotional strain associated with childbirth and the puerperium. Under the post-1995 code, a mother who kills her baby may be convicted of murder.

Canada provides a contrasting legal arrangement in the account: its infanticide provision applies to a woman who kills a child under one year old while affected by a mental disturbance related to pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation. That category is not the same as the Spanish provision in Article 20.1. The historical comparison clarifies the different legal questions at stake: whether infanticide should be treated as a distinct offense, and whether a defendant’s mental condition meets the threshold for exemption from criminal responsibility. In Alice’s trial, the article offered the defense a route to argue the latter, while the expert disagreement showed how much depended on interpreting a contested account of mental illness.