A 77-year-old man who had been convicted of raping and impregnating his granddaughter in a municipality in the Braga district saw his sentence confirmed by the Supreme Court of Justice after an appeal.
The man allegedly abused his granddaughter on several occasions, who lived with him and his wife after her parents’ divorce, when she was still a child and then as a teenager, resulting in the birth of a baby who is now nine years old.
According to the ruling consulted by O MINHO, even though the victim was already an adult and had a boyfriend, the man tried to caress her again during the pandemic, groping her against her will when she went to clean her grandparents’ house at her wife’s request. of the abuser.
The ruling details that the defendant “groped the victim’s buttocks on the Saturday immediately preceding (05/9/2020) the day on which she reported the facts to the police authority (05/16/2020)”.
“What he did to his own granddaughter and the consequences it had on the entire family was very serious. There is no exceptional circumstances in this case that would justify a change, downwards, in the unitary sentence established by the Court of Appeal. The demands for general prevention are very intense and the institutional reaction has to assume an assertive and effective deterrent stance, especially since the defendant, despite his age and the time that has passed, does not appear to be in the slightest in accordance with the expected level of conscience, repentance and understanding of the worthlessness of the action”, wrote the judges who confirmed the conviction.
A DNA test requested by the court was carried out and “led to a 99.99999996% probability that the defendant is the biological father of the victim’s child”.
In court, the defendant’s wife, and the victim’s grandmother, said that she was unable to confront him with the results of the DNA tests.
The victim’s father, who emigrated to Switzerland several years ago, testified that he “learned about the victim’s pregnancy at an advanced stage of pregnancy”, clarifying that, on the “many times” he asked her about the identity of her child’s father, she sent He always remained silent and cried.
The young woman ended up passing away in December 2020, aged just 23, for reasons that were not described in the ruling.
The victim’s boyfriend ended up playing a key role in the trial by testifying that the victim told him that “the defendant had sexually abused her since she was 13 years old (that is, from a date no earlier than 05/07/2010, day of her 13th birthday)”, that the defendant approached her to perform sexual acts when she was “alone in the basement” of her maternal grandparents’ room or, “called” her to that compartment, and , on those occasions, the maternal grandmother and her sister were also at home, although in other rooms; the sexual acts took place on a sofa installed in the aforementioned basement, which the victim told the defendant “to stop”, “cried” and he “forced” her to perform these acts
The man was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison without the possibility of appeal.
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