By Adam Cooper, The Age with AAP
Akon Guode, the woman who killed her three youngest children by deliberately driving her car into a lake, has had her jail term slashed by eight and a half years on appeal.
Guode was last year jailed for 26 and a half 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 8, was rescued by residents and emergency service workers.
Guode appealed against her sentence and the Court of Appeal last 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 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 she lived a difficult life in South Sudan, having witnessed the murder of her husband before she was raped.
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”.
