- Event: France judges a woman who hid her newborn daughter for two years in the trunk of her car
French justice on Wednesday sentenced five years in jail to a mother who had hidden her baby for two years in the trunk of a car , leaving the girl with irreversible damage.
Rosa Maria Da Cruz, 51, and mother of three other children, had been sentenced in the first instance in 2018 to five years in jail, three of them suspended, but appealed the sentence.
An appeal court sentenced her on Wednesday to a firm penalty of five years in jail. Da Cruz faced a maximum penalty of 20 years.
This case, which shocked all of France, came to light in 2013, when the girl's mother, named Séréna, drove the car in which she kept her daughter hidden since her birth about two years ago to a mechanical workshop.
The baby was discovered naked, covered in excrement and unable to keep her head up in her mother's car. The latter had hidden the baby's existence from her husband and children.
The couple had three other children, between 6 and 12 years old at the time, all of them in school and normally integrated into society.
Séréna, who lives with a host family and will soon be eight years old, suffers an "80% functional deficit", an "autism syndrome surely irreversible" related "unequivocally" to the conditions of his first 23 months of life, according to evaluations
The defense alleged that Da Cruz suffered a "denial of pregnancy," the third in four pregnancies, followed by a "denial of a child," an argument the accusation rejected.
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