A 20-year-old woman confessed this Tuesday, November 18, in court that she tried to kill her son, who was five months old at the time, when he was admitted to the Pediatric Hospital of Coimbra.
The 20-year-old mother’s statements were made behind closed doors, after the defendant told the panel of judges that she felt inhibited from giving statements about the case with other people watching, said the president of the panel of judges, Cabral Fernandes, after the woman had been heard.
“The court considered that it was justified to remove people from the room” in order to hear the defendant’s testimony, he explained, when the session was reopened.
Cabral Fernandes told those present and the media that the defendant, in her statement, “fully confessed, almost without reservation, the facts” of which she is accused.
The young woman is accused of trying to kill her son twice, between December 31, 2024 and January 2, 2025, when the baby was in intensive care at the Hospital Pediátrico de Coimbra, following health problems (the child has a genetic disease that leads to disturbances in intellectual and physical development, recurrent airway infections, brain and skeletal and limb anomalies).
On two separate occasions, according to the prosecution, the defendant placed cotton and paper balls in the cannula associated with the ventilation tube next to the baby’s trachea, causing, on the second attempt, the victim’s cardiorespiratory arrest.
After the full confession, the witnesses associated with the process were dismissed and the trial immediately proceeded to the final arguments.
The defense lawyer admitted that this is “a serious crime”, but stressed that it is necessary to look at the circumstances in which the crimes occurred.
“We cannot deny or forget that this lady confessed to the facts, we cannot deny or forget that the lady does not have any criminal record, we cannot deny that the lady was motivated by several fears, evident in her speech”, he said.
The lawyer recalled that the defendant was afraid that the child would not develop “within normal standards” and that she had acted in an “attempt to obtain leniency or save this child from suffering”.
This situation “does not take away the seriousness of what was done by the defendant”, but it helps “to understand something that was going on in this lady’s head and which has to do with undiagnosed depression”he stated, trusting the collective to ensure a “good application of justice” that takes into account the context in which the crimes were committed.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office considered that the defendant has an “unbalanced and unstable personality”stressing that, after a first situation, he went ahead with a second attempt to take his baby’s life.
The prosecutor also alleged that the defendant decided to take the baby’s life “out of selfishness and not out of mercy”, refusing the idea that she suffered from depression or hormonal changes in the postpartum period because the attempts took place five months after giving birth (according to the National Health Service website, postpartum depression affects “between 10 and 15% of mothers” and can appear shortly before giving birth “and/or throughout the first year after giving birth”).
The Public Prosecutor’s Office said that there is “a devaluation of the child’s own life” and coldness in action, and argued that the defendant be sentenced to an effective prison sentence.