Brooke Skylar Richardson, 20, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday for a charge of abuse of a corpse. The hearing is set to begin at 11 a.m. ET. You can watch in the player above.
Jurors convicted the defendant on Thursday on one count of abuse of a corpse but acquitted her on the other charges against her: aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter, and endangering children. As the verdict indicated, jurors decided that prosecutors failed to prove she ended the life of her newborn baby.
Richardson faces six months to a year in jail for the abuse of a corpse charge.
Prosecutors tried to show that Richardson callously ended the baby’s life. The defendant, then 18, hid the pregnancy, gave birth just a couple of days after prom, and buried the baby in the backyard, the prosecution said. As seen on interrogation footage, she said she gave birth in the bathroom in the middle of the night. After repeated denials, she admitted to possibly squeezing the baby, and to attempting to cremate the body.
Her defense argued that this was a false confession and that an expert who examined the baby’s body later walked back the claim that the bones showed signs of having been burnt. They said she only learned about the pregnancy just days before the birth. This wasn’t unusual, they argued. She had suffered from an eating disorder, and her weight fluctuated throughout her life. Even her boyfriend at the time didn’t realize she was going to have a baby, they said.
[Screengrab via Law&Crime Network]