Oregon woman acquitted in baby-death retrial

EUGENE, Ore. – A jury took less than two hours Thursday to acquit an Oregon woman on trial for the second time on allegations that she killed her newborn son, in a case in which no remains were found and defense attorneys argued the woman was never pregnant.

Angelica Swartout’s first trial ended earlier this year in a hung jury. Jurors in that trial said they were one vote shy of a unanimous guilty verdict, the Eugene Register-Guard reported.

In both trials, the 25-year-old former hotel clerk from Springfield stood in the witness stand and pushed out her stomach to demonstrate how she faked a pregnancy.

Swartout recanted a confession to police, testifying that after she got a false positive result on a pregnancy test, she pretended to be expecting because she became an “instant favorite” in a large adoptive family in which she had felt ignored.

She said she falsely told her family and friends that she delivered a stillborn son at a local hospital.

Swartout told police in December 2010 she delivered the child in a bathroom at her workplace, suffocated it and put it in a garbage container. But officers searched a landfill extensively and found no remains.

The jury heard conflicting testimony from doctors about whether Swartout’s body showed signs that a child had been delivered.