Woman sentenced for beating child into coma

A WOMAN from Llucmajor was sentenced to 12-years in prison for hitting her adopted son causing him to go into a coma in June 2006. At the time the child was six-years-old and the mother beat the child because he had not done his homework.

When she saw he was unconscious she tried to revive him with cost water, changed his clothes and called her husband, telling him the child had fallen down. He asked her if she had called an ambulance, which at that point in time she had not. The father was found not guilty since he was unable to stop the incident, the Palma judge decreed.

The boy was adopted in Romania by the couple five years before the incident which has left him in with 98 per cent disability and no possibility FOR improvement. Maria de la Nieves, aged 44, was convicted of beating the child until he entered a coma, but not of regular abuse as the prosecution claimed, as there was not sufficient evidence.

She has been ordered to pay €1.5 million compensation to the child and has been forbidden to approach or communicate with him for 20-years.