A Balgownie woman who failed to get her seriously ill daughter medical treatment in time to save her life has been found not guilty of manslaughter, after a judge ruled her failure to act was not ‘‘grossly negligent’’.
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The two-year-old girl died in Shoalhaven Hospital just after 10am on October 11, 2009, after her mother and stepfather found her unresponsive on the couch that morning after staying the night at a relative’s home near Nowra.
She had been sick for a week before her death and had been seen by a Wollongong Radio Doctor GP on the evening of Monday, October 5.
The doctor recommended she be taken to her regular doctor if her symptoms persisted.
However, the court heard the mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, did not get medical treatment for the child even when she could no longer hold down food or drink, appeared very lethargic and was vomiting smelly, brown liquid later found to have contained ‘‘faecal organisms’’.
An autopsy discovered the child had major internal injuries, including a ruptured small intestine from an earlier incident of blunt force trauma to the stomach (the origin of the trauma is not known), which had developed into a severe case of peritonitis.
Left untreated, the peritonitis had turned septic and caused widespread blood poisoning.
As a result, police charged the woman with manslaughter by gross criminal negligence.
She pleaded not guilty and won the right to have her case determined by a single judge, not the standard 12-person jury, owing to the very limited availability of certain Crown witnesses, including specialist doctors.
The trial began in March, and was spread over multiple days in three months, with the not guilty verdict being delivered in a Sydney courtroom on Friday morning.
The woman cried out and placed her hand over her chest at the news, immediately looking to friends and family sitting in the rear of the courtroom.
She then made her way out of the dock and fell, sobbing, into the arms of her lawyer, Wollongong barrister Cathy Doosey.
In handing down the decision, NSW District Court judge David Frearson accepted evidence from specialist doctors that the girl could have been saved had she received medical attention up to just a few hours before her death.
He found the woman had been ‘‘substantially negligent’’ in failing to seek treatment for the girl, saying any reasonable carer would have done so.
However, he said the woman’s failure to get help did not ‘‘reach the [criminal] threshold of gross criminal negligence’’.
