This week, a Winnebago County judge ordered a Rockford woman to spend up to 100 years in a mental health facility for the 2013 stabbing death of her son.
A judge earlier this year ruled Jody Kossow not guilty by reason of insanity after she stabbed her 12-year-old son Thomas more than 55 times, killing him.
She told 911 operators that “Satan was after me.”
The judge says Kossow must be confined to psychiatric care up to 100 years.
Marc Falkoff, a criminal law professor at Northern Illinois University, says Kossow could be freed one day if she is deemed mentally competent.
“She can only be confined civilly so long as she is insane," he said. "If she turns out no longer to be insane, she cannot continue to be confined.”
Falkoff says people do largely recover from mental illnesses.
“If magically, someone developed a pill that cured your, perhaps schizophrenia that caused your delusions that led to your being acquitted, and you took that pill," he says, "and the next day [you] were sane and understood the nature of right and wrong, and did not represent a danger to yourself or to other people, then you would have to be released.”
Kossow’s mental health will be evaluated every 60 days.
