The woman who pleaded guilty to leaving her newborn baby in a trash can at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics was sentenced to probation and avoided prison time at a sentencing hearing Friday in Iowa City.

Judge Marsha Bergan ruled inside the Johnson County Courthouse that the prison time should be suspended in favor of five years of probation for Ashley Hautzenrader, 24. Hautzenrader had agreed to a plea deal and entered an Alford plea of guilty to child endangerment and to neglect or abandonment of a depended person in August.

The decision came after a three-hour sentence hearing that included Hautzenrader addressing the court for 30 minutes uninterrupted, recounting the days, weeks and months before the incident at UIHC.

Specifically, Hautzenrader detailed at great length how she was at the hospital the day of the incident because her other child was being admitted to the intensive care unit for a serious heart condition that the first child had been suffering with since before they were born. Hautzenrader recounted driving back and forth between UIHC and her home in Davenport for well over a year as her first child dealt with the medical issue.

"I'm just asking you to listen and try to understand what I've been through," Hautzenrader told the court.

Police say Hautzenrader gave birth to a baby in a University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics bathroom on May 8, 2016. Police said at the time that Hautzenrader thought the child was dead and tried to flush it down a toilet before leaving it in a pillowcase in the trash, cleaning the bathroom and leaving.

Police say Hautzenrader told officers at the time she did not know she was pregnant and that she admitted to leaving the child in the trash after she thought it had died. The baby was found alive by hospital employees a short time later.

Before Hautzenrader addressed the court, her attorneys John Bruzek and Julia Zalenski introduced a witness, psychiatrist Dr. Cara Angelotta, a faculty member at Northwestern University, who had seen Hautzenrader after the incident at UIHC.

Angelotta told the court that she believed Hautzenrader was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder due to the many months of hospitalization she had seen her first child go through, as well as a condition known as pregnancy denial.

Bergan said in court that her decision to hand down a "lengthy probation" sentence instead of jail time was "not an easy decision," but that she had taken Hautzenrader's age, the fact that she had no prior convictions and that Hautzenrader had agreed to treatment for PTSD immediately after the incident at UIHC into consideration when making her decision.

If Bergan had handed down prison time instead of probation, Hautzenrader would have likely faced two years for child endangerment, an aggravated misdemeanor, and 10 years for neglect or abandonment of a dependent person, a Class D felony. Those sentences would have been served concurrently.

The attempted murder charge, a Class B felony, that had been levied against Hautzenarder had been dropped by Johnson County attorney Janet Lyness in mid-August as part of a plea deal in which Hautzenrader had agreed to a gulity plea to the two lesser charges.

The attempted murder charge would have been punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

Lynes had recommended that Hautzenrader serve the two-year and 10-year sentences concurrently — not only to "send a message to the community that this not an acceptable behavior," but because she had seemingly acted with purpose in putting her just-born child into a pillow case, then the child into a bag, then putting the bag into the trash and then proceeding to clean the bathroom in which the child was born.

The exact parameters of the probation were not set as of Friday night.

Bergan added that Hautzenrader would do "considerable" community service and still have to pay court fines.

Reach Zach Berg at 319-887-5412, zberg@press-citizen.com or follow him on Twitter at @ZacharyBerg.