In a case that has shocked the United States, a mother was found guilty of murdering her 28-day-old baby daughter by putting her in a microwave for two horrific minutes.
China Arnold, who was 31 at the time, committed the appalling crime against her infant Paris following a dispute with her boyfriend over the child’s paternity, prosecutors said.
Medical experts were left deeply disturbed after examining Paris’s body, which had reached fatal temperatures. “She died because she was overheated,” stated Dr. Marcella Fierro, the former chief medical examiner for Virginia.
“She was cooked.”
The woman from Dayton, Ohio, managed to avoid the death penalty but was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of aggravated murder in 2011, according to Express US. Court-appointed psychiatrists determined that Arnold had normal intelligence and displayed no signs of mental illness.
Authorities believe Paris died shortly after her body temperature skyrocketed to between 107 to 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Arnold took Paris to the hospital the next day where doctors declared her dead, reports the Mirror.
Arnold was arrested in November 2006. Although the baby had no external burns, the medical examiner identified hyperthermia as the primary cause of death, revealing catastrophic internal heat injury.
Arnold’s criminal past includes previous convictions. She was found guilty of abduction in 2000 and forgery two years later, each followed by a five-year probation period, according to Montgomery County Common Pleas Court’s jail records.
Arnold faced trial three times for the murder of her infant daughter, with each trial carrying the potential for a death sentence due to Ohio’s capital punishment laws since 1974.
Her first trial ended in a mistrial in February 2008 when a new witness emerged just before the closing arguments.
The second trial resulted in a guilty verdict and a life sentence seven months later, but this conviction was overturned on appeal.
In May 2011, her third and final trial concluded with a guilty verdict for aggravated murder and a life sentence without the possibility of parole, after the jury unanimously decided against the death penalty.
Arnold, who is also a mother to three boys, has been serving her sentence at the Ohio Reformatory for Women since September 2008.
