A Frenchwoman has been sentenced to nine years in prison for killing her newborn babies over a period of 11-year period.
Dominique Cottrez, a 51-year-old mother of two daughters, has stood trial for six days at court in the city of Douai in Northern France.
In the worst infanticide case in modern French history, the jury decided Cottrez’s judgment was impaired at the time of the killings.
They convicted her of seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder for the first baby she killed in 1989. The last was killed in 2000.
The prosecutor, while acknowledging her fragile mental state, had called for Cottrez to be sentenced to 18 years. Her lawyers welcomed the shorter sentence, saying it reflected “hope for Cottrez”.
For more than four years, Cottrez convinced police investigators, psychiatric experts, the judge and lawyers of a false story — that she had been raped by her father as a child and was involved with him in a long, incestuous relationship even while being married.
In court, she initially said she killed her babies because she feared they were the product of incest.
“This woman was never a criminal,” her lawyer Frank Berton said after the ruling. “This woman was walled in her silence, walled in her isolation, walled in her obesity.”
