First published on 
Harlee-Rose Niven, pictured with her father, Dylan Berry, was killed by Jessica Mulford (right).
Photo: Composite photo / NZME
A teen stepmum who inflicted such severe fatal abdominal injuries on a toddler that it split the girl’s pancreas has won a bid to have the Supreme Court reassess her jail sentence.
Jessica Lee Rose Mulford was jailed for five years and seven months in the High Court at Hamilton last year after being found guilty of the manslaughter of 2-year-old Harlee-Rose Niven.
She was also found guilty of injuring with intent to injure after strangling Harlee-Rose five months before she died in April 2022.
Mulford was convicted and discharged by Justice Neil Campbell on that charge.
Justice Campbell said while the cause of Harlee-Rose’s death had been determined, the mechanism remains unknown.
“But it is consistent with stomping, kicking, or punching” in such a severe way that it split her pancreas in two, lacerated her liver and would have left her unconscious within minutes.
In September, Mulford’s counsel Nick Dutch failed in his Court of Appeal bid to have Mulford’s prison term halved on the grounds of her age, background factors, and that Justice Campbell’s seven-year starting point was too high.
The Court of Appeal judges said that while another judge may have given slightly more discount for her young age and mental health at the time, they would not.
“We are not persuaded that an allowance of 15 percent amounts to error warranting appellate intervention in a case involving, as this one did, such extreme violence against a defenceless toddler.”
Dutch then turned to the Supreme Court, and in a decision released on Thursday, it granted Mulford leave to appeal her sentence on the grounds of “whether the Court of Appeal was correct to dismiss the appeal”.
The appeal will be heard at a later date.
‘She struggled with parenting’
At Mulford’s trial, it was heard that Harlee-Rose spent the first 18 months of her life living with her mother.
However, in August 2021, she began living with her father, Dylan Berry, and his partner, Mulford, then aged 17, took on the primary caregiver role.
While the Crown accepted that Mulford at times cared well for Harlee-Rose, she also struggled with parenting and resented having to look after someone else’s child.
On 9 November 2021, Mulford strangled Harlee-Rose, injuring the back of her neck and causing her face to swell and discolour.
There was also bruising to Harlee-Rose’s earlobe consistent with pinching.
Mulford lied to the medical staff, falsely claiming the toddler had fallen from a deck.
Five months later, on 9 April 2022, Mulford killed Harlee-Rose with such force to her abdomen that it ruptured her internal organs.
‘It’s not the full picture’
At her Court of Appeal hearing, Dutch also argued that Justice Campbell’s finding that the victim’s injuries were consistent with Harlee-Rose having been stomped on, kicked, or punched in the abdomen was “not the full picture”.
He said there was evidence from a forensic pathologist that the injuries could also have been caused by an adult kneeling on the child’s abdomen, or standing on it for a sustained period.
Dutch said Justice Campbell shouldn’t have used the facts of the strangulation as an aggravating feature when setting his seven-year starting point.
He also argued her discount for youth should have been 30 percent, rather than the 15 percent she received and said the 5 percent for her background factors was also inadequate. He instead pushed for 10 to 15 percent for the latter.
Concerning Mulford having a drug addiction, the Court of Appeal said in the absence of a causal or “even contributory” nexus between that and her offending, “the Judge was fully entitled to decline giving any discount”.
The senior court also found that Justice Campbell was cognisant of the limitations of Mulford’s mental health report, and ruled that her sentence was not manifestly excessive and dismissed the appeal.
*This article was initially published on the NZ Herald