A 22-year-old woman in Taichung was given a reduced sentence after judges accepted she acted under desperate circumstances minutes after giving birth alone.

• She dropped her newborn son from an 11th-floor window after a fight with the baby's father; the infant died.
• Prosecutors charged her with murder of a child, but the citizen-judge court downgraded it to infanticide by the mother, giving four and a half years.
• The court weighed that she was alone, raising a toddler by herself, and buried under debt.
• Investigators found she had been used as a front for a company by her godfather, leaving her owing more than NT$10 million, plus a car loan she guaranteed for her ex-boyfriend that he never repaid.

Outlook: The verdict can be appealed, and the case is likely to fuel debate in Taiwan over how courts treat mothers in extreme financial and social isolation.