A trans-identified male in Portugal has been handed a 25-year prison sentence after murdering his father and attempting to murder his mother. In what was described as a “psychotic episode,” 43-year-old Tânia Ferrinho stabbed his elderly parents in their Samora Correia home last fall.
According to independent news outlet Reduxx, on October 10, 2022, Ferrinho, who is chronically unemployed, got into a heated dispute with his parents over finances. The man demanded his parents provide him with pocket money, which they refused.
That same day, police visited the residence to inform Ferrinho, who was already on probation for a 2021 conviction of aggravated assault against the senior couple, that an additional case was being filed against him.
After the police left, Ferrinho attacked his bedridden mother with a knife, turning his attention towards his 77-year-old father afterwards. As his father fled out into the hallway of the building, a concerned neighbor managed to capture a recording of Ferrinho brutally slashing him, which was presented as evidence to the court during the trial.
Ferrinho’s father died as a result of his injuries in December of 2022 at the Vila Franca de Xira Hospital, and while his mother survived the attack, she passed of unrelated illness around the same time.
Despite Ferrinho’s lawyer attempting to blame his actions on a “psychotic episode” during the court proceedings, judge Sónia Vicente explained she was shocked by his cruelty toward his parents.
“I didn’t see any concern on your part about what was going on there,” she said. “Your father was already bleeding very profusely, and I didn’t see any concern on his part about what was happening, none.”
Although the court rejected the defense’s claims of a mental break, Ana Gomes, a prosecutor for the case, still attempted to rationalize the murder as being the result of “the inner conflict” presented by Ferrinho’s transgender identity and utilized feminine pronouns to refer to him throughout the trial.
“There is sensitivity to understanding the inner conflict of someone who, from a young age, does not identify with the gender they were born with,” she added.
Yesterday at a court in Santarém, Ferrinho was sentenced to 22 years in prison for killing his father and 11 years and six months for attempting to murder his mother. However, because the maximum sentence allowable in Portugal is 25 years, Ferrinho was handed a single sentence of 25 years in prison.
While it is currently unknown if Ferrinho will be sent to a women’s prison to serve his sentence, he had previously been housed in a female facility during his trial.
Last year, Portugal Resident reported that female prison guards at the Tires Prison Establishment refused to body-search him during the intake process because he still had “male sex organs.”
Although the female guards eventually searched him “under protest,” Hermínio Barradas, the president of the governing body overseeing correctional officers, explained that the women had refused because “the procedure involved seeing a person of a different sex, and seeing a penis.”
