The jurors of the Namur Assize Court declared Cathy guilty on Friday evening of involuntary manslaughter through lack of forethought and/or precaution on the person of her newborn on June 5, 2012.
Cathy, a 48-year-old woman, was on trial for infanticide, the murder of a baby at or immediately after birth. When asked to decide on this first question, the jury responded that she was not guilty. They stressed that it had not been established that she had taken any action that caused the death of her newborn.
Given this “No” on infanticide, they had to answer a subsidiary question on involuntary homicide. They then ruled that by not calling for help when her newborn was in distress and alone, she was guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
There will be no penalty because, for involuntary manslaughter, the statute of limitations is ten years. And he is overwhelmed.
At the Namur assizes, the accused contests infanticide: “I was planning to leave him in the woods”
A crime without a body
Many gray areas, which were not clarified by the proceedings in the Assize Court, surrounded this extraordinary case judged since Monday. This is a case without a corpse: the body of the newborn that Cathy gave birth to at home in Houdremont has not been found.
It also seems certain that, if on June 6, 2012 around 2:30 a.m., Cathy had not had to be urgently hospitalized for bleeding, no one would have learned that she had just given birth to a baby.
Many gray areas, which were not clarified by the debates in the Assize Court, surrounded this extraordinary affair.
It was in fact the gynecologist on duty at the Dinant Hospital Center who had informed the prosecution because, upon examining his patient, he had noted that she had just given birth. Also informed by the doctor, Cathy’s companion said “fall from the clouds”unaware of a pregnancy.
Cathy, already a mother of two children, had hidden that she was pregnant. According to the words of this woman who everyone agreed that she rarely shared her emotions, she understood this in April. Before the investigators, she varied in her explanations.
According to the Assize Court, she had given birth in the early evening shortly before her partner returned from work. She had placed the baby, whose torso she had seen moving, under her bed in a bag, time to change her husband. When he returned to the room, less than an hour later, the child was dead. She had pretended to be racing to dispose of the body in a trash can. The searches, carried out as far as the incinerator in Herstal, had been unsuccessful.
“I never wanted to hurt my baby”Cathy wanted to say, her voice filled with sobs, when the president of the Assize Court gave her the floor for a final word before the jury retired to deliberate.
The body of the newborn never found: an infanticide with multiple gray areas judged in court in Namur
Family secrets
This guilt for infanticide, the civil party, represented by Me Nicolas Devaux, like the public prosecutor, considered it established. Me Devaux defends the interests of Cathy’s youngest daughter, now 13 years old and stressed at the idea of her mother returning to prison but who, at the same time, for her own serenity, seeks to escape the heavy uncertainty which hangs over this affair.
Like Attorney General Barbara Marganne, Me Devaux noted that a newborn is a vulnerable being and the lack of care or the failure to provide food to it is equivalent to murder.
The defense, represented by Me Jean-Philippe Mainz, did not share this reasoning. It was he who had suggested that the Assize Court ask, as a subsidiary question, the question of involuntary manslaughter, a question to which he had however hoped, from the jury, a negative answer, pleading primarily , acquittal.
For Me Mainz, nothing proved that the baby was alive at birth. We cannot, he said, rely solely on the statements of his client, heard without a lawyer in difficult conditions in the hours following her delivery, when she said that her baby’s chest was moving. “We don’t talk about breathing”argued the lawyer who cited an expert opinion which cannot exclude that the baby was not stillborn.
