A woman who left her baby to die in a bathtub has been found guilty of his manslaughter.

The 29-year-old Auckland woman, who has interim name suppression, was charged with murdering her 13-month-old son on November 8 last year.

She pleaded not guilty to the charge when her trial began in the High Court at Auckland last week.

A jury made up of  11 women and one man found the woman guilty of manslaughter by unanimous decision this afternoon after deliberating for five hours.

Last week the quietly-spoken woman gave evidence in her own defence this morning and spoke of the day she found her son's body in the bath.

She said she left her son - known as Baby A - to play with his "fish toys" in the water while she prepared breakfast for her daughter in the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later she "suddenly remembered" she had left him in the bath.

"When I went back into the bathroom I saw [Baby A] he was on his stomach facing down into the bath.

"I picked him out of the bath and checked for his pulse on his neck. He wasn't breathing. His body was quite heavy and flaccid and his mouth was blue."

The woman said she picked him up and checked his vital signs.

"I knew he was dead. At that stage when I saw that he had no pulse and he wasn't breathing I thought that it was too late.

The court heard the woman's father had been killed in a plane crash when she was six, her aunty had committed suicide by jumping off a building and her mother had burned to death.

Both her mother and her aunty had a history of severe mental illness and had spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals in Fiji, the court heard.

The woman said she had been raised by various relatives because "my mum was not capable of taking care of me". 

At age seven she was raped by one of her relatives.

The woman's lawyer, John Anderson, earlier told the jury they would have to decide what was in the woman's mind on the morning of the death.

Mr Anderson said his client had become "progressively mentally unwell" after the births of her children and had been in a "major depressive episode" when the baby died.

When the woman discovered her baby lying limp in the bathtub she had checked for vital signs, he told the court.

"When she realised [Baby A] was dead she went into a disassociated state and that is why she appeared to people who saw her as emotionless."

This also explained why the woman had spent time on various internet sites, including Facebook, immediately after the baby's death, Mr Anderson said.

Mr Anderson told the jury the death of the woman's baby was an accident.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/4052011/Baby-bath-death-verdict

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