Judge Kevin Russo sentenced Lidia Quilligana, 32,  during an emotionally charged sentencing hearing on Tuesday, six weeks after she entered a guilty pled to reduced charges of second-degree assault, downgraded from first-degree assault in exchange for pleading guilty to 24 counts of risk of injury to a minor.
Quilligana pled guilty to some charges under the Alford doctrine, meaning she doesn’t agree with all the evidence but acknowledges there’s enough for a conviction.
The child minder, an immigrant from Ecuador with three children of her own, was arrested in 2015 in Danbury after she was caught on a hidden camera repeatedly abusing her employers’ 3-year-old girl and 1-year-old twin siblings, according to The News-Times. 
Prosecutors say she also ripped hair out of the children’s heads.
A defense attorney called Quilligana’s actions ‘unfathomable’ at Tuesday’s sentencing, but said she was not a ‘monster’ but ‘a sad person who lost control.’
The attorney also said Quilligana was abused as a child at the hands of her drunkard father and was using the only discipline she knew.

Quilligana had worked for the family for about a year when the abuse came to light. At the time of her arrest in March 2015, she was pregnant with her third child.
The family had set up the nanny camera in December 2014 after suspecting that something was happening to their eldest daughter.
On March 27, 2015, incident, the child’s mother had come home from work when she saw her daughter’s burned hands and black eye and asked Quilligana what happened, according to court records.

Emotional: ‘Torture Nanny’ Quilligana, wept in court in March 2015 after her arrest

An arrest warrant said the nanny told the mother the child had placed a chair next to the stove and accidentally burned her hands before falling and injuring her head on one of the stove’s knobs.
But surreptitiously recorded video showed that it was Quilligana who dragged the toddler to the hot stove and placed her hands and legs against the burners.
The girl suffered from second-degree burns,..
‘There was an amount of sustained and depraved cruelty that I’ve never seen before,’ said attorney Sharon Dornfeld, who was appointed to represent the victims. ‘She tortured those children.’
According to the prosecution, the nanny cam recorded 10 days’ worth of abuse in March 2015, showing Quilligana, among other things, causally picking up the three-year-old girl by the hair and swinging her around, ‘much like a track star swing a hammer,’ said Assistant State’s Attorney Warren Murray.
At another point in the recording, which has been sealed by the judge, Quilligana could be seen letting the toddler out of a toy box, where she had been confined, and ordering her to go upstairs, only to viciously slap the child across the face.
‘I couldn’t control myself,’ Quilligana said Tuesday through an interpreter. ‘Believe me, I loved those children with all my heart. I’m sorry a thousand times.’
The victims’ mother rejected the nanny’s apology and said in a statement there was no excuse for her conduct.
The judge agreed. In handing down the 15-year sentence, Russo conceded it was inadequate.
“The punishment doesn’t even come close to fitting the crime,” he said.