Crime

Indian American Gets 12 Years in Jail For Disposing Newborn in Trash

Nausheen Rahman said that she was terrified of her family's reaction to her pregnancy before marriage.

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The New York State Supreme Court sentenced an Indian American woman to 12 years in prison for throwing her newborn baby in trash. Nausheen Rahman, 30, had, before her sentencing, submitted a plea before the court saying that her actions were a result of orthodox Muslim upbringing, which looks down on unwed mothers.

“When I became pregnant, I was terrified of the response of my father and the cultural backlash that I knew I would experience, so I hid my pregnancy out of fear; fearing condemnation and estrangement from the family and an unspoken terror that would brand me as an evil and wicked person for the rest of my life,” her statement said.

“It is the cultural corruption (of Islam) that places young girls and women under very rigid and unforgiving circumstances,” she told the court.

Nausheen’s father, Aamir Rahman, refused to comment on what his daughter did, India West reported.

The sentence was agreed upon when Rahman pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Sept. 12, according to Nausheen Rahman’s attorney Michael Cirigliano. “If we had gone to trial, she would have faced 25 years to life,” he told the publication. He also said that the judge could have imposed more years despite the negotiated plea.

The judge did not heed Rahman’s plea for leniency before her sentencing on Dec. 11, according to a Staten Island Advance report.

Calling her actions “unthinkable, unforgivable, callous,” he said: “You took a harmless child and put it in a garbage bag as if it was a worthless piece of trash. Today and only today do you show an ounce of remorse, so your sentence is well deserved.”

Rahman, a resident of Staten Island, New York, has been in custody since March 12, 2016. The police had found a newborn baby, sucking on his thumb in a fetal position, wrapped inside a garbage bag in a trash bin outside Rahman’s house. After her arrest, she gave a confession to the police saying that she had not checked to see whether the baby was breathing. Rahman told detectives in a video-recorded interview last year: “I was like, ‘OK, he’s not crying, he’s not moving, maybe he’s dead. When I picked it up to put it in the bag, that’s when I saw he wasn’t breathing.”

Rahman has already served almost 22 months of her 12-year sentence.

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