A 22-year-old woman was convicted of murder and given a 10 year prison sentence on Monday after the court ruled that she had suffocated her infant child in the Kaivoksela district of Vantaa late last April.

According to the District Court of Eastern Uusimaa, the act was murder. The court also ruled that the defendant, who had been ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation during the pre-trial investigation, was in a state of diminished responsibility at the time.

The woman suffocated her child, who was just under two years of age, in late April 2020 after the child’s father had gone to work. According to the court, the woman decided to kill the child the night before.

"No understandable motive for killing her child has come to light. No dispute or compulsion experienced by [the defendant] related to her child has been discovered," the court's judgment says.

The woman herself called the emergency services shortly after 6 AM on the morning of the murder and said she had killed her child. An ambulance crew arrived in just over ten minutes and was met by the woman at the main door to the block of flats.

"[She] was calm and told me that the child was upstairs in the apartment and was dead," according to a witness statement.

Premeditated

According to the prosecutor, the woman had thought about killing her child several days before the act and made a decision to kill her son on 28 April, the day before she carried out the murder.

According to the charges, the act was premeditated and carried out in in a particularly brutal and cruel manner.

No other parties or intoxicants were involved. The child's father, who lived in the same apartment, was not present at the time of the murder.