A HIGH COURT judge has given a seven-year sentence to a father who allowed his defenceless four-year-old son to be subjected to what was described in court as a “frightening” campaign of physical abuse.
Passing sentence on the man today at the Central Criminal Court, Mr Justice Paul McDermott also said the man misreported the boy’s “catastrophic” fatal injuries, which he added was a “shameful betrayal” of the child.
The child was found at a house in the southwest of the country on 13 March, 2021. He died three days later in hospital on 16 March in Dublin.
A post-mortem report revealed that the boy’s cause of death was traumatic head injury in association with blunt force trauma to the abdomen.
The 35-year-old defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty last March to charges of endangerment, neglect and impeding the apprehension of the person who he knew …