A mother who killed her young son during an ice-fuelled crash on the Fleurieu Peninsula continued to drive and consume drugs after the tragic death, a court has heard.
Stacey Brooke Panozzo, 35, was today sentenced to three years and eight months in jail with a non-parole period of two years and three months for killing her seven-year-old son Jackson in the crash at Kuitpo.
District Court Judge Paul Cuthbertson refused to suspend the sentence or order home detention, saying the offending was too serious.
He also banned her from driving for a decade.
"The death of an individual is a terrible thing, and the driving of a motor vehicle so dangerously as to risk that and then cause the death of that human being is an offence of the most grave kind," he said.
"The fact that the human being, in this case, is the child of the offender is no doubt severe punishment in itself for the offender.
"But it is small comfort for the individual whose life is lost and will never grow up to experience the joys and the things that make life worth living."
Multiple breaches of bail for drug use
Panozzo admitted to causing death by dangerous driving and seven breaches of bail, which were all positive tests for ice or MDMA after the fatal crash in November 2018.
She also admitted to two counts of driving while her licence was suspended while on bail.
Judge Cuthbertson said those breaches of bail were more serious because they occurred after she had killed her seven-year-old son.
"The fact that the offender was in the grips of a methamphetamine addiction goes some way to explaining, but the persistent offending is not excused by it," he said.
During a hearing in July, the court heard Panozzo had been driving around at all hours of the night with children in the car "whilst full to the eyeballs with methamphetamine".
In handing down the sentence, Judge Cuthertson said Panozzo slowly drifted on to the wrong side of the road before realising and over-correcting, losing control and crashing into a large tree at 100kph.
Panozzo had a cocktail of drugs — including methamphetamine, diazepam, ketamine and fentanyl — in her system at the time of the crash.
Outside court, her partner Marcus Rayner said Panozzo got off lightly and nothing would bring his son back.
