It's rarely that clear-cut, especially if you're basing your opinion on a headline.

Take Andrea Yates, the woman who became famous for drowning all 5 of her children. This case is unique because female family annihilators are virtually unheard of.

Sounds awful, right?

But then you learn the details. Andrea Yates was severely mentally ill. Like diagnosed schizophrenic, hearing voices, multiple suicide attempts, etc. She was on medication, and her doctor advised her not to have more children, as her post-partum psychosis was terrible and getting worse with each one. But then her husband, a devout Christian, convinced her to go off her meds and have another child. A few weeks after that appointment, she was pregnant with baby number five.

After the baby was born, her husband left her alone with all the kids one day and went to work, despite her doctor telling them, again, not to do this under any circumstances. In the twenty minutes interval while she was unsupervised, she drowned the children. She claimed to have been hearing voices, and was convinced God wanted them back in heaven.

Her husband is arguably the guiltier party here, and he displayed basically no remorse. After Andrea was forcibly committed to a mental institution, he got married again and had even more kids.

So yeah, snap judgments are bad.