A County Court in Melbourne has sentenced an Indian woman to 30 months in prison over a car crash that caused the premature birth and subsequent death of a baby.
Dimple Grace Thomas, a 32-year-old former nurse and personal carer, had rammed her car into a car driven by Ashlea Allen, who was seven months pregnant with her baby Melarniah in Cranbourne on August 8, 2016, the Age reported.
Allen suffered severe abdominal pain and had to undergo an emergency cesarean. However, her daughter Melarniah could not be saved and died two days later.
Thomas was leaving the gym and was supposed to take a left onto the South Gippsland Highway but she instead entered a one-way road and drove across three lanes to try to enter a gap in the central median strip and turn right, the County Court heard. However, she did not see Allen's car which led to the crash at about 60 km/her.
Thomas' lawyer described her as an inexperienced and nervous driver and told the court that she got confused about the intersection thinking that a car in the median strip was giving her a chance to turn right, the Age reported.
However, Judge James Parrish found that the design of the intersection was "unambiguous" and clarified that cars leaving the parking space had to turn left. He said that Thomas displayed a "wanton disregard for the law" by driving across the highway.
The court heard that Thomas had used the intersection several times previously and had always turned left as required and that her attempt to turn right in 2016 would have meant that she would take lesser time to reach home.
Thomas will now have to serve 15 months in prison before being eligible for parole. The judge also acknowledged that she faces deportation to India, which would prove to be an extra burden to her sentence.
Allen and her partner Christopher Oscuro, who are parents to a two-year-old daughter, told the court of the pain and suffering they went through when they lost their daughter. She added that she does not remember meeting Melarniah due to her medication at surgery.
Allen said that the pain and the devastation that she went through was something she would "never wish for any other mother to go through because the pain and suffering are too much. Our family should have been complete but is now forever broken."
Allen later told reporters outside the court that the sentence "can never take back the fact we lost our daughter."
Thomas, on the other hand, wrote letters to Allen but prosecutors said that they were sent not as a sign of guilt or remorse but because the former nurse wanted to reduce her culpability.
Judge Parrish, however, accepted that there were signs of remorse and that Thomas' physical and mental well-being had deteriorated since the accident.
