By Staff Reporter
By Adam Cooper, The Age
Akon Guode, the woman who killed her three youngest children by deliberately driving her car into a lake, has had her jail sentence slashed by 8½ years on appeal.
Guode was last year jailed for 26½ years for driving into Lake Gladman in Wyndham Vale with four of her children in the car on April 8, 2015.
Four-year-old twins Hanger and Madit and 16-month-old Bol all drowned, but their older sister, now eight, was rescued by residents and emergency service workers.
Guode appealed against her sentence and the Court of Appeal on Thursday cut the jail term to 18 years. She must serve 14 years before she is eligible for parole, having previously been jailed for a minimum of 20 years.
Chief Justice Anne Ferguson found Guode’s state of mind was disturbed when she drove into the lake, as a result of the traumatic birth of her youngest child, Bol.
Guode has already served three years in prison, meaning she could be released in just over a decade, although she faces being deported to her native South Sudan on her release.
Guode pleaded guilty to two counts of murder, one of attempted murder and one of infanticide.
The charge of infanticide applies to women who kill their children who are younger than two when affected by mental-health problems related to childbirth. The infanticide charge relates to Bol’s death.
Guode’s lawyers have argued that her offending be viewed through the infanticide prism given she was a mother of seven in financial trouble whose mental health had declined since she lost a lot of blood during Bol’s birth.
Justice Ferguson said before Guode and her children came to Australia as refugees, she had lived an extraordinarily difficult life in South Sudan, having witnessed the murder of her husband before she was raped.
In their reasons for reducing her sentence, the appeal judges found Guode “fatefully and irredeemably breached” her children’s trust but also “her capacity to make calm and rational decisions was severely compromised by a mental condition which was not of her own making”.
At Guode’s 2017 sentencing, Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry said the woman had survived being raped and the death of her soldier husband in war-torn Sudan before starting a new life in Australia.
Justice Lasry said much of the case remained a “tragic mystery”, as Guode had not explained exactly why she killed her children.
She initially claimed she had suffered a dizzy spell, the court heard, but neurological tests showed no problems.
Justice Lasry said Guode had lived an “extraordinarily difficult life” and that cases such as hers tested the community’s compassion, as people wanted to understand how parents could kill their children.
“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,” he said.
Guode drove four laps of the lake before she did a U-turn, steered through the only entry point to the lake and accelerated into deeper water.
She then got out but did nothing to help residents and emergency services workers who frantically tried to save the children.
With AAP
