A mother who intentionally drove her car into a Wyndham Vale lake, which resulted in the deaths of three of her children, will be re-sentenced following a decision by the High Court.
Akon Guode drove into the lake on April 8, 2015, killing her four-year-old twins Hangar and Madit and 16-month-old son Bol. Her five-year-old daughter survived.
In 2017, the Supreme Court sentenced Guode to 26.5 years jail with a non-parole period of 20 years, after she pleaded guilty to one charge of infanticide, two charges of murder and one charge of attempted murder.
The court heard that Guode, a refugee, had suffered severe psychological trauma and symptoms of depression after experiencing the civil war in South Sudan, including watching the murder of her husband and being raped until she fell unconscious.
At the Supreme Court hearing, Justice Lex Lasry said: “In my opinion your actions were the product of extreme desperation rather than any form of vengeance of a kind that has arisen in other cases of people killing their children.”
In 2018, the Court of Appeal re-sentenced Guode to 18 years in prison with a non-parole period of 14 years.
The court found that the Supreme Court had erred by giving insufficient weight to Guode’s mental condition and other mitigating factors, and had imposed a “manifestly excessive” sentence in relation to three of the charges she pleaded guilty to.
However, the state’s Director of Public Prosecutions successfully appealed Guode’s reduced sentence to the High Court last week.
In a 3-2 split decision, the High Court judges found the Court of Appeal erred “by taking into account the Crown’s acceptance of the respondent’s plea of guilty to the charge of infanticide when considering whether the sentences imposed for Charges two, three and four (the two murder charges and attempted murder charge) were manifestly excessive”.
The High Court ordered Guode return to the Court of Appeal, to be re-sentenced.
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