A 21-year-old woman has been sentenced to three years in prison and five years of probation for killing her own newborn baby, the Pudong New Area People's Court said on Wednesday.

The Uygur woman, whose surname was given as Wu, was a high school student when the crime was committed.

She gave birth to a baby boy at 7:30am on May 20, 2019, in the school she was attending in Huinan Town, but then stuffed his mouth with toilet paper, put him in a plastic bag and threw him out of a fourth-floor window, the court said.

The baby fell onto a lawn below the building and was discovered by passersby. He was later pronounced dead in a hospital, and the cause of his death was later forensically confirmed to be hemorrhagic shock and central nervous system failure due to craniocerebral trauma and liver damage from the fall.

Wu, who bled severely after giving birth, was also taken to the hospital for treatment. She was apprehended by police the same day and confessed.

She was accused of murder, but considering that she had a "lack of experience and knowledge about the law and was not completely malicious when committing the crime," the court put her on probation.