A woman has been sent to jail for seven and a half years for throwing her newborn baby out of a window for fear that her child would harm her career.
German woman Katarina Jovanovic, 28, was found guilty this week of manslaughter at the Heilbronn District Court over the killing of her newborn baby in September of last year.
She had apparently kept her pregnancy a secret and gave birth to the baby by herself at home. A neighbour said: “Nobody noticed that the woman is pregnant. In the end, she changed, and no longer talked to us. We thought she had stress at work.”
The court heard that a passerby found the baby with a shattered skull in front of Jovanovic’s apartment building in Lauffen.
Prosecutors alleged that Jovanovic, a former executive in the legal department of German auto giant Porche, had thrown her child out of her window and killed her in order to protect her career.
Prosecutor Mareike Hafendörfer said according to Bild: “The accused was not prepared to abandon their life plans, especially their professional advancement, for a child.”
“Before the delivery, Katarina J made the decision to kill her child. The standard for murder has bee fulfilled,” he argued.
Jovanovic’s lawyers maintained that she had accidentally dropped the child from the window after supposedly being surprised when the birth occurred, claiming that she was unaware that she was pregnant.
Defence attorney Malte Hoech said per the Daily Mail: “It is a drama that affects me personally. My client did not even know that she was pregnant.
“When she suddenly held the bloody baby in her hands, she was in an exceptional psychological situation. It was an accident, she dropped the baby. How the child ended up over the windowsill remains to be determined.”
While the court ultimately agreed on the lesser charge of manslaughter, it sentenced Jovanovic to seven and a half years in prison, more than the three-year sentence requested by the defence.