Modern Australian

How does mental illness affect sentencing?

  • Written by Jamie Walvisch, Lecturer, Monash University
How does mental illness affect sentencing?shutterstock

Just last week, the Victorian Court of Appeal significantly reduced the sentence given to Akon Guode, a mother who killed three of her children after driving her car into a lake in Melbourne. The main reason for the 8½ year sentence reduction was that the trial judge had not sufficiently taken Guode’s major depression into...