A mother who murdered her newborn baby girl has lost an appeal against her conviction.
Hannah Cobley, who had concealed her pregnancy from family and friends, inflicted severe head injuries on the infant and sealed her inside three plastic bags despite signs she may still have been alive.
Prosecutors said Cobley killed her baby daughter “with chilling clarity of purpose” before abandoning the child’s body in an overgrown area of the farm where she lived with her parents and cousin in Stoney Stanton, Leicestershire.
Cobley, formerly of Broughton Road, denied murdering her baby in the early hours of April 26 2017, but was convicted of murder following a trial at Leicester Crown Court and jailed for a minimum term of 18 years in June 2019.
The 31-year-old challenged her conviction at the Court of Appeal in May, arguing that fresh medical evidence suggested that the partial defence of diminished responsibility would have been open to her at trial.
But, in a ruling on Tuesday, Lady Justice Macur, sitting with Mr Justice Jay and Mrs Justice Foster, dismissed her appeal.
Lady Justice Macur said Cobley’s defence intended to call a consultant psychiatrist at trial to give evidence that an acute stress reaction might explain her actions and provide a defence of diminished responsibility.
However, after seeing Cobley give evidence, the psychiatrist told her lawyers that he “no longer believed that her mental functioning had been sufficiently disturbed as to explain her actions”, Lady Justice Macur said.
After she was convicted, Cobley’s lawyers found a new psychiatrist who said she was suffering from symptoms of a moderately severe depressive disorder with features of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
But Lady Justice Macur said the internet searches “relating to the act of harming a newborn child prior to the calculated time of the child’s birth” undermined the new psychiatric evidence.
Searches made on Cobley’s phone included “what happens if you drop a newborn baby” and “how long can a newborn baby last without milk and in the freezing cold”, her trial heard.
Lady Justice Macur added: “The internet searches and (Cobley’s) contemporaneous accounts and conversations do not support the proposition that she was delusional or that the fatal event was spontaneous.”
The Court of Appeal concluded that Cobley’s conviction “is not undermined” by the fresh evidence and dismissed her appeal.
