The Court of Appeal has reduced the sentence imposed on S.H. for sexually abusing her son, ruling that the original eight-year term, with the final 18 months suspended, was excessive.
In a judgment delivered on 11 July 2023, the court allowed S.H.’s appeal against the severity of her sentence, quashed the sentences imposed by the trial court and resentenced her. The new sentence is six and a half years’ imprisonment, with the final 18 months suspended on the same terms and conditions set by the trial court. The court said she remains on the sex offenders register for the period required by statute.
The offending took place in two periods. The first involved indecent assaults between 1984 and 1987, when the boy was aged between birth and three. The second involved sexual assaults between 1992 and 1995, when he was about seven to 11. The trial court had imposed six years on count 1 and two years on count 14, to run consecutively, and taken other counts into consideration. It suspended the final 18 months of the resulting eight-year term.
S.H. argued that the trial judge had not properly accounted for the age of the offences, her rehabilitation efforts, mitigation and the overall proportionality of the sentence. The Director of Public Prosecutions argued that the sentence reflected the seriousness of prolonged abuse and the harm to the victim, as well as the mitigating circumstances.
The appeal court agreed that the trial judge had identified the aggravating and mitigating factors, including S.H.’s guilty pleas, admissions, lack of previous convictions and counselling. It found no error in the judge’s consideration of totality, and said the absence of a stated headline sentence was not, by itself, an error in principle. But it considered two matters especially significant: the first period of offending could not have been prosecuted without S.H.’s admissions, and she had attended counselling about 30 years before allegations were made. The court concluded the overall sentence gave insufficient weight to those factors.
For the first period, the appeal court set a five-year headline sentence, reduced to three years after mitigation. For the second, it set a five-year starting point, reduced to three and a half years, giving less weight to the late guilty pleas. The terms were ordered to run consecutively, producing a total of six and a half years. The court said it had considered proportionality and totality. It suspended the final 18 months to incentivise rehabilitation, on the same conditions as before.