The Kerala High Court (the highest court in the southern Indian state of Kerala) has acquitted a woman who was sentenced to life imprisonment for smothering her 15-month-old child in 2016, ruling that she was under severe mental stress at the time of the incident. The court applied Section 115 of India's Mental Healthcare Act of 2017, which presumes a person to be under severe stress if they have attempted suicide — the woman had tried to take her own life at the same time as the infant's death. The ruling is significant because it affirms the retrospective reach of the Mental Healthcare Act and establishes that an acquittal on a suicide-attempt charge does not automatically strip a defendant of its mental stress protections.