Baby shaken to death: Father acquitted
Following the violent death of a six-month-old baby from Essen, the child's father was acquitted of manslaughter on Tuesday. He had been accused of brutally shaking his daughter in February of this year. The baby was admitted to hospital with severe brain damage and died there. According to the verdict of the Essen jury court, the perpetration of the 24-year-old Bulgarian cannot be proven beyond doubt. The accused had been incriminated by his former wife. However, the 22-year-old had made contradictory statements in the opinion of the judges. The verdict is not final.
After the crime, suspicion initially fell on the girl's mother. The 22-year-old was remanded in custody for almost a month. However, after further questioning, in which she accused her husband for the first time, she was released. The man was arrested instead.
The accused himself had denied the allegations from the outset of the trial. At the time of the crime, both parents were with their two children in the apartment they shared in Essen. According to the verdict, it was also not possible to establish that the mother could have shaken her child to death. "The crime remains unpunished under criminal law," said the judge.
However, the 24-year-old did not get away completely unpunished. The judges imposed a year and a half suspended prison sentence for breach of duty of care. According to the verdict, the three-year-old brother of the deceased girl had been extremely neglected.
The verdict is not uncontroversial: the public prosecutor's office had classified the killing of the baby as manslaughter and demanded ten and a half years in prison together with the breach of the duty of care.
The jury's verdict stated that the perpetration of the brutal acts leading to the baby's death could not be proven beyond doubt, as the father's involvement in the alleged shaking processes remained unproven. Despite being acquitted of manslaughter, the father was sentenced to a year and a half suspended imprisonment for negligently allowing his surviving three-year-old son to suffer from severe neglect.
Source: www.dpa.com
