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Bahía Blanca: they acquit a woman, sentenced to 8 years in prison for the death of her newborn baby

2021-06-22T19:03:46.630Z


With a ruling with a gender perspective, a court released Rosalía Reyes, who spent a year and a half in prison.


Gabriel Bermudez

06/18/2021 4:21 PM

  • Clarín.com

  • Society

Updated 06/18/2021 4:21 PM

After 18 months in prison and the last 15 at home under house arrest,

Rosalía Reyes (48) is free again.

The delivery of the electronic bracelet that had been monitoring his movements since last year was the last tie that he managed to remove.

It was after

a judgment of Cassation acquitted her for the murder of her fifth daughter,

a baby who died at birth.

On May 18, 2005, around 11 p.m., the woman returned to her humble home in Argerich, in the south of the province of Buenos Aires.

After a long day's work in a field

, which had started about 6 a.m. every day, she felt very sick and went to bed.

I was about 7 months pregnant.

Within two hours, a strong contraction abruptly woke her up.

Another followed her and made her go to the bathroom.

There,

in the middle of a large pool of blood, a baby was born,

whom, according to the Criminal Court 3 of Bahía Blanca, Rosalía did not let live. 

"It is clear that the death of the newborn would have been avoided if Reyes acted in the same way that he did towards his person" the judges reproached him in February of last year, when they

sentenced her to 8 years.

They blamed her for having tied the end of the umbilical cord

and not the one that linked her to her daughter.

Rosalía with her lawyer during the trial.

Photo: The New

"And it is there where I understand that he had the concrete possibility of doing it, after recovering from the blackout and regaining consciousness," the Bahian court ruled.

The judges also relied on the four previous births that Reyes had had, some of them

from different absent parents

, one of whom he

later denounced for abuse and violence. 

“It is terrible that they have considered that as an experience.

As determined by the autopsy,

the baby dies of hypovolemic shock ”,

remarked the official defender Fabiana Vannini.

In dialogue with

Clarín

, he emphasized the circumstances in which Rosalía, who

had kept her pregnancy hidden so as not to lose her job

on which her family depended, had to face the emergency situation.

“In a bathroom, in a precarious house,

with her four youngest children shouting behind the door 'Mommy don't die' and she bleeding to death.

Remember that as he could, he managed to tie his part and when he went to attend the newborn, she was dead ”, the lawyer described.

Once the death was consummated, the woman wrapped the small body in a bag, which she buried in the courtyard of her house.

In its ruling, the Bahia court

had objected that the woman considered the baby dead

, without resorting to any type of assistance.

"That sentence was a horror,"

Vannini questioned.

"There was no evidence to convict her and the judges made up for that absence,

with gender stereotypes

, in this case, that of the bad mother who does not take care of her children," he said.

In contrast, he considered "reparative" the acquittal voted by judges Daniel Alfredo Carral and Ricardo Ramón Maidana, of Courtroom 1 of Cassation.

"It

attacks each of the stereotypes

of forms of conduct on the ideal and abstract model of a bad mother that Rosalía, according to the court of first instance, failed to comply," said the lawyer.

"It follows that the definition of the stereotypical role that Rosalía had to fulfill as a 'good mother' results in

a decontextualized assessment of her situation of vulnerability"

is read in the resolution that accepted the appeal presented by the official defender.

Dedicate several paragraphs to the description of the social and work environment in which the woman lived.

"The stereotypical criteria or standards of a" good mother "translate into an

extraordinary extension of her duties

, in the assumption of risks for her own physical integrity and even in her resignation in order to protect her children. These demands, in this case with criminal connotations, they are discriminatory because they impose the renunciation of basic rights, subordinating them to the maternal role, ”the judges warn.

Carral and Maidana consider that this way of applying criminal law

"reinforces the gender stereotype as a self-sacrificing mother who denies herself in favor of her family

, as a citizen with second-rate rights."

For Vannini, this is

an “excellent and precedent-setting failure”

.

He said that Rosalía "already feels free and content, after having spent several years of so much unjust suffering."

The woman received the good news at her home, where since March last year, she had been serving house arrest.

Until 19 of that month, before the quarantine began, she

had been imprisoned in the Azul prison,

after being referred from Unit 4 of the Buenos Aires Penitentiary Service in Bahía Blanca.

Between the two prisons, she spent a year and a half deprived of liberty.

ME

Source: clarin

All life articles on 2021-06-22

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