The homeless mom who starved and beat her baby to death in 2004 was handed the maximum sentence today by a Manhattan judge and excoriated for her cruelty. "Your actions, or inactions, toward your son were depraved," the judge said as he condemned her to 25 years behind bars. "It's incredible a mother could treat a child like that." Jovannie Florestal and her husband were living in a Harlem shelter when 911 operators received calls for an ambulance to the address. When it arrived the child's father handed it to an EMT then fled down the block.
The injured and malnourished three-month old was dead by the time it reached the hospital, reported the Times back in 2004. A medical examiner said it was a homicide. In 2006 Florestal's husband pleaded guilty to shaking and hitting the baby, according to the Post, and was handed twenty years for murder. The mother, who was 20 at the time of her sons death, was convicted too but she's kept out of jail thus far because the use of an outdated version of the depraved indifference statute by the jury made a retrial necessary. The judge explained her harsh sentence, saying that, "Cruelty is simply more cruel when unleashed upon a helpless child."
