Alicante man given a two-year suspended sentence for abusing his 7-month-old baby

A 26-year-old man was sentenced to two years in prison by an Alicante court for beating and injuring his seven-month-old child. However, the accused, who was placed in preventive detention following his arrest in 2021, will not be sent to prison because the sentence suspends its execution provided he refrains from committing any crimes for the next two years.

The defendant, who was represented by attorneys Francisco Miguel Galiana Botella and Alicia Grau Córdoba, was found guilty of a crime of injury after first being probed for a homicide attempt.

After being admitted with a perforated intestine, the 4-year-old baby spent 18 days in the paediatric intensive care unit (ICU) of Alicante General Hospital, where his survival was questioned. Thankfully, he recovered from his injuries. After his parents, who were 22 at the time, were arrested, the Generalitat took care of the kid. Although the mother’s complaint was ultimately dismissed, the mother was also the subject of a court investigation.

Following a plea agreement struck during the trial between the prosecution and defence, which had sought a five-year prison sentence for serious injuries, Criminal Court No. 10 of Alicante imposed the punishment.

Given that he paid 4,477 euros in civil liability claims to compensate the minor prior to the trial, the verdict finds the minor’s father guilty of assault with the aggravating circumstances of treachery and kinship and the mitigating circumstances of confession and reparation of damages. The 6,000 euros the offender paid as bail to be freed from prison was used to pay the reparation.

The offender is sentenced to two years in prison, three years of special disqualification from exercising parental control over his young son, and a three-year prohibition from approaching his son within 300 meters or communicating with him in any way. He would only have three months remaining in the sentence’s three-year term, though, because his parental power has been revoked since the incidents. After serving this time, he may attempt to reclaim parental power by starting a new administrative procedure.

He reported a household mishap

At the hearing, the defendant entered a guilty plea and acknowledged the facts the prosecutor’s office had brought against him. Up until this point, the defendant had maintained that his kid had been involved in a domestic mishap at home in Alicante and had hit himself with a toy after falling off a sofa.

The sentence’s declared proven facts took place in Alicante on the afternoon of May 27, 2021. At the house where he lived with his girlfriend and the minor’s mother, the accused was by himself caring for his seven-month-old baby. He was with the youngster in the marriage room at an unspecified time that day when he “hit him several times with such force that the minor had to undergo emergency surgery for a jejunal perforation and mesointestinal haematoma.” The kid spent 18 days in the paediatric intensive care unit at Doctor Balmis General Hospital in Alicante and four days in the hospital ward during his 22-day recovery from the intestinal perforation.

The child was left with a “slight scar from the central abdominal laparotomy” as a cosmetic harm, but the verdict claims that he does not have “anatomical functional sequelae” as a result of these injuries.

After the hospital was informed that a newborn had been admitted with injuries incompatible with the domestic accident his parents had recounted, the police arrested the parents. When the mother got home and started throwing up, the boy was brought to the hospital when he was alone himself with his father.