Father found guilty of killing his three-month-old son 'possibly for life insurance policy worth $750,000'

It's a case that has baffled the US for more than 15 years.

Moussa Sissoko has been found guilty of the child-abuse killing of his three-month-old son Shane in 2001 according to The Washington Post.

A Montgomery County judge presiding over the case ruled this week that the father was guilty after a complicated, two-week trial held in front of the judge, not a jury.

The death occurred in 2001 when Sissoko was 22-years-old at the time.

At the time of the infant's death, Sissoko according to court testimony, appeared to care about his son.

However, the court heard that behind the scenes the father was working to become the sole beneficiary of a $750,000 life insurance policy on Shane, according to the judge.

On the witness stand giving her testimony mother of the deceased infant, Tiffany Paris, was asked to identify two individuals in a photograph to the court according to The Washington Post.

"My son," she mother said.

"And?" the defense attorney asked.

"The man who murdered my son," Paris replied according to reports.

"I can't explain human behavior. Nobody can explain human behavior," Judge Mason said while delivering his verdict according to The Washington Post.

"And I think we all know enough, at this age in our lives, that you can't judge by appearances."

The father had been convicted before in the death of his infant son - in 2002 - and was sentenced to life in prison.

However, he later appealed, lost, and later asserted that he'd had ineffective lawyering during the earlier case according to online reports.

Last year, another judge, Ronald Rubin, agreed that Sissoko deserved a new trial because his original defense lawyer had failed to call a pediatric neuroradiologist as a witness to discuss the child’s extensive injuries.

Sissoko remained locked up pending the outcome of the new trial.

During Sissoko's new trial, prosecutors said that he inflicted head trauma on his infant son.

However, defense lawyers said prosecutors could not prove what happened, and that Shane died from an accident or natural causes.

"This is a medical mystery," an attorney for Sissoko, Robert Bonsib, told Mason at trial according to online reports.

"Killing his son was not his plan. His son died. He was as devastated as anybody by it, and he's had to spend a long time in jail."

"The trauma was insufficient to leave external evidence of the point of the impact,” Bonsib said.

In the end, Mason concluded that medical evidence, along with the life insurance plan, showed Sissoko had planned and willfully killed Shane.

"The defendant inflicted abusive head trauma upon the deceased that was the cause of his death - by either shaking and/or causing soft impact trauma to the child," Mason said.

Sissoko returned to jail and is set to receive a new sentence May 26.

For the mother of the deceased infant the judge's verdict came as a huge relief. "Like a weight lifted off my shoulders," she said after the hearing.

News break – March 26