The Hull Daily Mail reports that a Hungarian couple, Orsolya Répási and Tamás Német, were sentenced to 3-3.5 years of jail for physically abusing the woman’s three months old baby.
The couple is from Hungary, as Index writes. Répási is the child’s mother, but Német is not his biological father. The two became a couple when Répási was already pregnant with the boy, but the pregnancy was concealed from the biological father.
The harm done to the baby was discovered when he was taken to a doctor, as the mother noticed that the child had a “limp” left arm. The baby boy suffered several serious injuries, including a spiral fracture in his arm (most likely caused by twisting his arm), a broken 11th right rib (the child was possibly squeezed so hard by the chest that the ribs almost touched the backbone), a broken left thigh and a broken left shin. The injuries were all deliberately inflicted, as the intensity of the trauma and damage shows.
“On the unchallenged medical evidence, each injury required the separate use of excessive force to inflict it, and each injury would have caused the child immediate and extreme pain, causing him to scream out and be extremely distressed for up to half an hour.”
The 9 days long case proved to be so distressing and so horrible in the details, that a juror even cried upon hearing them.
Both parties denied the accusations, blaming each other, in the hopes of being acquitted. However, as the Hull Daily Mail writes, they were sentenced to jail by Judge David Tremberg on the grounds of having caused traumatic physical harm to an infant, and also on letting such thing happen, as it cannot be said clearly which one of them has committed the crimes.
It was not just a juror that was shaken to their core by this cruelty, but the judge too, who told the couple the following:
“In some cruelty cases the defendants are individuals who themselves have significant personal limitations by reason, for example, of extreme youth, or by reason of cognitive deficits or learning difficulties. That is not the case here.
“Both of you are not unintelligent; you are articulate, devious and dishonest, and entirely lacking in remorse and bent on self-preservation.”
Allowing and committing a crime of this scale is in itself inhumane, along with not taking the blame for it, but it is reported that both defendants listened to their verdicts without the slightest sign of remorse or regret, and were seen “smiling and laughing outside court”.
On top of this, Német has a history of child abuse from Hungary: in 2006 he was convicted for causing similar physical harms to a baby girl (fractured skull, broken rib, black eyes). His sentence for causing traumatic physical injuries by negligence was suspended. Répási was unaware of this when they got together. The judge remarked on this that he has never dealt with a case where the defendant had two accusations of this kind.
Répási told the jury that she always dreamed of becoming a mother,
but the abuse inflicted on the child and the fact that she was described as not understanding a child’s basic needs during supervised contact after the injuries were found out.
Német was sentenced to three and a half years, while Répási for three years.
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