The Valencia Court has confirmed a life sentence subject to review for a man who beat to death a seven-month-old baby, the son of his partner, in the family home in Elche.
The court has thus rejected the appeal lodged by the convicted person against the Supreme Court ruling, which confirmed the sentence of life imprisonment subject to review that a Jury Court of the Provincial Court of Alicante for the murder of the minor.
The accused defended himself by claiming that the facts constituted a crime of negligent homicide. This appeal was rejected by the Court, stressing that “it is difficult to deny that someone who, in a particularly violent manner, hit a minor, who was seven months old at the time of the events, up to four different times on the head, did not contemplate the high probability of causing his death, a representation that did not inhibit him from carrying out his conduct.”
The boy’s mother was also acquitted of the crime but was sentenced to one year in prison along with her partner for the crime of child abuse.
The crime occurred in 2021 after a series of previous assaults that led to the tragic outcome. According to the proven facts, on May 15, 2021, while they were in a public establishment, the man reprimanded the minor “with disproportionate violence” and gave him “a strong slap in the face.”
The Court attributes to the mother the responsibility of “tolerating” the aggression, despite being present during it instead of protecting her son or recriminating her partner’s actions.
It was nine days later, on May 24, when the woman went to work and left the child in the care of the other defendant at the family home. The man then hit the baby up to four times “with great violence on the child’s head and caused injuries that caused death.”
The court also rejected the appeal filed by the father of the baby, in which he challenged the amount of compensation of 25,000 euro established in the judgment as compensation for the moral damage caused as a result of the death of his son.
In his ruling, a report by Judge Leopoldo Puente, he states that the compensation, although it is certainly lower than that established in the personal injury assessment system, has not been set in an arbitrary, capricious or devoid of any reasonable justification manner.
“On the contrary, it is based on reasonable and reasonably stated considerations, without any substantial reason being seen to rectify them,” the judges stressed.
