British Pair Given 28 Months for Buying Baby in Romania

BUCHAREST, Romania — A British couple were in shock after they were sentenced Friday to two years and four months in jail by a Bucharest court for buying a baby and trying to smuggle her out of Romania in a box.

“They are not too good. They are in a state of shock,” defense lawyer Ioana Floca said after consulting her clients, Bernadette and Adrian Mooney.

The couple are the first foreigners prosecuted under tough new Romanian adoption laws aimed at stopping a wave of baby trafficking since the 1989 collapse of communism shed light on gruesome orphanages packed with thousands of children.

Floca has lodged an appeal but has yet to get the written judgment explaining the harsher-than-expected sentence.

While the Mooneys could have gotten five years, they hoped for a suspended sentence. They remain free on bail pending the appeal.

“They are out and they will stay out,” Floca said. “They are waiting for the appeal because they are very confident that the appeal judges will see that they are not so guilty.”

The Mooneys were arrested at the Hungarian border July 6 with a 5-month-old Gypsy baby, Monica, hidden in their car.

They are in Bucharest with their 3-year-old daughter Grace, legally adopted from Romania in 1991. Ruled too old to adopt--she is 40, he 42--the Mooneys took another route, paying a middleman $6,000 to find them a baby.

Monica’s teen-age parents say they got $500 for the child.

Three Romanian men convicted of arranging the sale were sentenced to two years and eight months in jail. Monica’s unmarried 17-year-old parents did not appear and were ordered to serve a year in jail when they turn 18.

Monica is in a Bucharest orphanage with 400 other children. They are among the 80,000 Romanian children in so-called cradles across the country. A handful are genuine orphans. Most have been abandoned or deposited indefinitely by parents who may come back and get them when their family or money worries end.