A HUNTER man found guilty of killing his severely disabled nine-year-old daughter by striking her an unknown number of times in the chest while she lay in bed has been jailed for a maximum of nine years.
The man, now 66, who cannot be identified, was found guilty of manslaughter by an unlawful or dangerous act in June after a two-week trial that focused on how the young girl sustained her fatal injuries.
The girl, who suffered from a severe form of cerebral palsy, weighed 15 kilograms at the time of her death and was unable to walk, talk or care for herself, the court heard.
She was found unresponsive in her bedroom on July 17, 2011, and a few days later a forensic pathologist determined her cause of death was blunt force trauma to the upper abdomen and lower chest. The key issues at the trial were whether the young girl died due to deliberate blunt force trauma and whether her father was the person who inflicted those injuries.
The girl's father had always denied any involvement in her death, with his defence team raising a number of other possibilities for how she sustained her injuries.
But after deliberating for about two-and-a-half hours, the jury returned on June 12 with a guilty verdict.
The jury's verdict means they were left with no doubt that it was her father who deliberately caused the injuries that killed the severely disabled girl. The case was one of the longest running criminal matters in NSW.
The girl died in 2011, but after interviewing her father three times police did not have enough evidence to charge him.
A coronial inquest examining the girl's death was about to enter its fourth day in April, 2013, when Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund suspended proceedings and ruled there was evidence capable of convicting a known person of a serious offence.
Strike Force Nylon detectives then provided a brief of evidence to the DPP to consider whether charges would be laid and in February, 2014, the man was charged with manslaughter.
His case stalled for years as trial dates were set and vacated and his legal representatives pursued a stay in the proceedings.
But more than eight years after his daughter died, the man was taken into custody on Friday to spend his first night behind bars.
In Sydney's Downing Centre District Court, Judge Peter Whitford sentenced the man on Friday to a maximum of nine years, with a non-parole period of four years and six months.
