Filicide found guilty by a jury of her peers

A woman accused of killing and freezing her two newborn babies has been found guilty by a jury of her peers.

The five men and four women of the jury arrived at the conclusion that the defendant had deliberately taken the lives of her children. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is asking for a 40 year sentence for murder with malice aforethought.

To reach their verdict, the jury took into consideration the testimony of the forensic surgeons that performed the post-mortem examination on the two children, according to which the victims breathed outside of the womb and were later drowned. There is a 99 per cent certainty that the newborn babies died a violent death as a result of submersion, they said.

“The first baby’s stomach was dilated and had an aqueous content that had been swallowed,” said the experts. However, a state’s evidence witness, expert in forensic medicine said: “I am certain, 100 per cent certain that there was no drowning.

The defendant, identified as Sara L.H., maintained during the trial that the first baby had been stillborn and that she had no recollection whatsoever of the second birth.

During his closing argument, the public prosecutor said the mother was “a monster” and “an evil person,” capable of “looking at her babies in the eye and of killing them.”

The verdict is also based on the testimony given by two psychiatrists of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Sevilla who examined the defendant after her arrest in 2012. According to them, it is 100 per cent certain that she is in full possession of her mental faculties and yet she deliberately killed her children fully aware of what was going on.