The High Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) has upheld the three-year prison sentence imposed on a man for causing serious injuries and for mistreating his one-month-and-20-day-old baby by shaking him with the intention that he stop crying, thereby dismissing the appeal filed by the defendant’s defense against the initial judgment.
As declared proven by the Provincial Court of Málaga, a ruling that is now maintained, the accused and the mother of the minor, who had maintained a romantic relationship since the beginning of 2019 and from which the child was born in February 2020, were at the home where they lived together on the day of the events when the child began to cry intensely.
The father then went over to try to calm him and find out what was happening; he picked him up in his arms and, upon checking that he could not soothe the crying, “moved and shook him forward and backward, causing the minor serious injuries, giving rise to the so-called ‘shaken baby syndrome,’” as the judicial ruling recorded.
As a result of that shaking, the baby suffered various injuries, including multiple intracranial hemorrhage, an occipital fracture, and external hydrocephalus, which made necessary an initial medical assistance and subsequent medical treatment, with a total of three surgical interventions. The recovery time was extended over 867 days.
Despite the medical course, the minor presents permanent sequelae, such as post-concussion syndrome, a cognitive disorder, and scars. In this situation, the Child Protection Service of the Junta de Andalucía ordered emergency fostering and declared the child to be in a state of legal neglect, who has been recognized as having a 49% degree of disability.
For these events, the man was convicted as the perpetrator of a crime of negligent bodily harm, in competition with a crime of mistreatment in the family setting, to three years of imprisonment and to disqualification from exercising parental authority for the same period, in addition to a prohibition from approaching the minor or communicating with him for two years and six months. In that same judgment, the mother was acquitted of the family mistreatment crime attributed to her.
Faced with the ruling, the defense of the convicted person filed an appeal, which the TSJA now dismisses for coinciding with the assessment of the Chamber of Málaga, which rejected that the injuries were fortuitous or the result of an accident and also that they could be derived from childbirth; conclusions reached from the expert and testimonial evidence carried out throughout the proceedings.