A woman in Auckland has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for causing the death of her infant son. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter at Auckland High Court in May after initially being charged with murder, but the prosecution later amended the charge.
She also pleaded guilty to two representative counts of assault on a child – one count for assaulting her four-week-old son before his death and one count of assaulting her other son, who was two years old at the time.
The woman’s lawyer, Ian Brookie, argued that the woman’s “extreme physical and emotional deprivation” during her childhood in an “unsafe and chaotic environment” should be considered both to reduce her culpability and a personal mitigating factor.
He referred to a psychological report that found the woman had clinical issues, including reactive attachment disorder. Crown lawyer Robin McCoubrey said it should only be considered personal mitigation, and Justice Geoffrey Venning agreed with McCoubrey: “You can’t have it both ways.”
Justice Geoffrey Venning set a starting point of six years, three months for manslaughter, uplifted by nine months for each of the assaults.
He emphasised her failure to obtain treatment for the dead child “when it must have been obvious he needed it”. Aggravating features also included her “extreme” violence, causing serious injuries and death, the children’s defenselessness and vulnerability, and her breach of their trust.
The court summary of facts for the case revealed that the woman was 20 at the time of the baby’s death at Starship Hospital in January 2022. The summary explained that the mother would “smack” her older son on several occasions before the second boy’s birth and hit her older son on the day she was discharged from the hospital after her younger son’s birth.
At post-mortem, the younger son was found to have healing clavicle and rib fractures caused by incidents before his death. On January 14, the fatal incident occurred when the mother became frustrated with her younger son and momentarily lost control, causing severe brain injuries that were a substantial and operative cause of his death. The mother left seven missed calls on the father’s phone and asked him to buy paracetamol.
The mother then took the bus to Starship Hospital with her sons, where the younger son was pronounced dead on January 16.
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