R v Raymond

[2018] QSC 97

SUPREME COURT OF QUEENSLAND

CITATION:

R v Raymond [2018] QSC 97

PARTIES:

THE QUEEN
v
MARIA LENA RAYMOND

FILE NO/S:

SC No 29 of 2018

DIVISION:

Trial Division

PROCEEDING:

Ruling

ORIGINATING COURT:

Supreme Court at Cairns

DELIVERED ON:

Ex Tempore on 27 April 2018

DELIVERED AT:

Cairns

HEARING DATE:

27 April 2018

JUDGE:

Henry J

ORDER:

The application for a ruling of no case to answer on count 2 is dismissed. 

CATCHWORDS:

CRIMINAL LAW – PARTICULAR OFFENCES – ACTS INJURIOUS TO THE PUBLIC IN GENERAL – NUISANCES – MISCONDUCT RELATING TO CORPSES – duty for disposition of a human body or human remains –  - whether the law imposes a duty to properly dispose of the dead - whether such a duty was imposed upon the accused

Burials Assistance Act 1965 (Qld), s 3
Coroners Act 1958 (Qld) ss 12, 18, 21
Criminal Code (Qld) s 236(a)
Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages Act 1962 (Qld) s 30
Doodeward v Spence (1908) 6 CLR 406, followed
Rees v Hughes [1946] KB 517, cited
R v Stewart (1840) 12 AD&E 1007, cited
Re Gray (2000) 117 A Crim R 22, cited
Williams v Williams (1882) 20 Ch D 659, cited

COUNSEL:

N Rees and M Franklin for the Crown

P Feeney and T Grau for the defendant

SOLICITORS:

Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions for the Crown

Wettenhall Silva Osborne Butler for the defendant

1. HIS HONOUR:   The prosecution case is that the accused gave birth to a baby which had completely proceeded in a living state from her mother prior to its death.  She is charged with the manslaughter of her baby on the basis that her failure to meet her duty of care to the child imposed by the Criminal Code (Qld) was a substantial cause of the baby’s death. That death is alleged, as a matter of inference, to have resulted from the baby being delivered head first into a toilet bowl, and not then being moved promptly to a position where it could breathe air, a necessary of life as distinct from the waters of the toilet bowl, into its lungs.

2. The accused’s uncontradicted account is that she did not know she was pregnant, or giving birth, until the baby proceeded from her on the toilet at her home, where no one else was present.  She claims that soon afterwards she wrapped her dead baby and walked to a house in her neighbourhood where there lived a woman she had seen about locally wearing a cross.  She left it outside a door of the house and left. 

3. The following day the upper torso of the baby was found on the front driveway of another house in the neighbourhood in circumstances suggesting dogs had been moving it about the local area.  Whether she left it outside a house, as she describes, the circumstances suggest she did leave her dead baby’s body somewhere out in the open, in a residential neighbourhood, where members of the public or…