Well, at least in Portugal baby killers are still considered dirt. Dad ALCINDO CABRAL, who beat his 5-month-old son to death, has been placed in isolation in prison after other inmates vowed revenge. I think that in a lot of countries--especially the U.S.--fathers who kill children or their mothers (especially in murder-suicides) have become so routine that it doesn't elicit a lot of public shock anymore. Just a yawn and a flip of the channel.
Note that Daddy had a history of domestic violence and threats against the mother. This is pretty typical.
http://www.theportugalnews.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?id=1057-16
Infant murderer placed in isolation
17/4/2010
A father who beat his five month old son to death has been placed in isolation in prison after other inmates pledged revenge for the heinous crime. The tot’s funeral took place last week under PSP police supervision.
Five-month-old David was beaten to death by his own father and left for ‘two or three hours’, according to autopsy results, before any sort of action was taken.
Only later did his father, 23-year-old Cape Verdean Alcindo Cabral, a brick-layer, warn one of his sisters and his wife, 20-year-old Carla Gonçalves, a cleaner, who was at work.
It was determined that the baby had suffered blows to the head and torso, which culminated in his death. He was assaulted in his home, in Alcobaça, though it is believed it was not the first time he had been beaten.
A police source revealed the baby showed ‘signs of earlier abuse’, though there were no hospital records to confirm he had received assistance for any sort of injury. Police therefore believe the young couple had treated their son with home remedies.
Reportedly Carla Gonçalves also suffered physical abuse at the hands of her husband, but kept quiet through fear of further abuse.
Last week, as the funeral took place and the tiny white coffin was lowered into the ground, Gonçalves family members struggled to restrain the baby’s distraught mother, who has been hospitalised since the incident.
She reportedly tried to stop the coffin from being lowered into the ground, screaming “Take my boy out of there; don’t let them bury my baby”:
Both sides of the boy’s family were at the funeral, the father’s relatives claiming they were there “with a clean heart”.
“I am very sad, I didn’t want this to happen, I wanted to see my grandson grow up”, Jovino Cabral, the baby’s paternal grandfather told Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã.
José Carlos Gonçalves, Carla Gonçalves’ brother, was described as ‘visibly upset’ and said he wanted ‘revenge for the death of his nephew, who was killed by his father like an animal’.
PSP police officers were waiting outside the cemetery, ready to intervene should there have been an outbreak of violence between the two families, though their intervention was not required.
Alcindo Cabral was jailed last week on Tuesday afternoon, and since his incarceration has been kept in isolation, segregated from other inmates through fear of reprisals. His fellow inmates have already threatened to attack him, should they pass him in corridors.
Reportedly, prisoners jailed for crimes such as rape, child sex abuse and child negligence are classified by fellow inmates as cowards and seen as prize targets in an unwritten code of conduct. Because of this, Alcindo Cabral is kept in his cell for 23 hours a day, only being allowed out to see daylight for one hour a day.