The man’s sentencing has been set for next month.
The trial culminated last week with the playing of an hours-long police interview in which the defendant at first admitted to slapping his daughter’s legs and hands out of anger because she had cried when he went in the room where she was sleeping. As the interview progressed, he admitted to pushing the baby’s stomach then eventually – after police showed him an autopsy photo of his daughter and read aloud her long list of injuries – admitted to punching his daughter four times with an estimated force of seven out of 10.
A demonstration of the blows appeared to show enough force to easily hurt an adult, with him putting his back into the pantomimed strikes.
“I’ve sinned,” he said through a translator as the interview neared to a close. “I murdered my daughter.”
Jurors appeared to find the interview significant, asking to watch the final 20 minutes of the DVD several hours into their deliberations.
The defendant declined to testify at trial but defence lawyers Mark Williams and Alex Cranstoun said during their closing address this week that their client was “not the most intelligent or articulate person” and didn’t know the proper legal definition of murder.
“[The child’s] death was tragic. It was unforgivable and unnecessary,” Williams told jurors, explaining that by acknowledging manslaughter the defendant “doesn’t ask you for forgiveness”.
But to be found guilty of murder, jurors would have to determine the defendant had murderous intent when he hit the child – something the defence contended their client never had.
Lawyers on both sides agreed from the outset the defendant didn’t go into his daughter’s room that night with a plan to kill her. But under the law, murderous intent can also be formed when a person attacks another knowing that death could well result and decides to take the risk anyway. In other words, prosecutors alleged, he gambled with his daughter’s life and lost.
But the defence noted their client said repeatedly throughout the police interview that the thought never occurred to him his daughter might die.
“What you need to look at is what he was thinking at the time he inflicted those punches, not when it’s all pieced together ... with hindsight from trained lawyers,” Williams said.
“It’s possible that [the father] wasn’t thinking at all when he punched [the baby]. He was reacting to the anger that he was feeling. This was in all likelihood an impulsive event that was over in seconds – a sudden loss of control without thinking about the consequences.”
While the defendant’s statement to police might make a good headline for prosecutors, it wasn’t accurate, Williams said, adding: “He didn’t know what the meaning of that word was. ‘I murdered my daughter’ is not a confession to murder.”
But Crown prosecutors Chris Howard and Katie Karpik said the defendant’s own words were significant.
His “incremental” admissions during the interview show he knew that punching his daughter was even more taboo and dangerous than having slapped her and was reluctant to admit it, they argued. The defendant only used the word “murder” after coming clean about the full extent of the attack. It was an acknowledgement to police that he knew he was gambling with his daughter’s life, they suggested.
Rather than without thought, Howard described the attack as a “determined” effort to injure a fragile baby that included returning her to a sitting position after one punch “just so he could inflict more damage on her”.
“It will be obvious to anyone that [she] was a vulnerable baby ... solely reliant on her mum and dad for her care and wellbeing,” Howard said, describing the victim as “utterly defenceless”.
“Surely, [the defendant] understood this.”
Howard also noted that for three days after the attack, as his daughter started to show obvious signs of distress including laboured breathing, the defendant not only did nothing to get her medical help but “withheld critical information” about the beating that could have saved her life.
He replayed for jurors CCTV footage of the father arriving at the medical centre after being told his daughter had died. He looked “pretty relaxed”, prosecutors suggested – a contention the defence denied.
In addition to the murder charge, jurors considered two assault on a child charges involving alleged non-fatal beatings of his daughter and his toddler son prior to the night of the fatal attack. They were based on testimony from the children’s mum that the defendant had beaten the children in the past.
“When he does that, it’s like he’s slapping an adult because he has a very strong, hard hand,” the woman said of her husband’s treatment of their son, adding that he became irritated and was “rough to the kids” when he couldn’t find any cannabis or methamphetamine to smoke.
But the defence noted the mother had also admitted to hurting the children, suggesting she could have been the cause of the baby’s non-fatal injuries. Jurors had watched a short video of the mum hitting her son with a TV remote control as he wailed. They were also shown a TikTok video, described by prosecutors as “cringey”, of the woman dancing, with her daughter in the background, just hours before her death.
The defence also pointed to medical testimony that some of the girl’s non-fatal injuries, including healing fractures on her leg and skull, could have been caused by an accidental fall from a bed or from her mother rolling on top of her while co-sleeping.
Jurors found the father guilty of a prior assault on his daughter but acquitted him of assaulting his son.
As through most of the trial, the courtroom gallery was empty, aside from detectives who had worked on the case, as the verdicts were read. Due to suppression, it was the only place the victim’s name could be discussed openly, but there was no one there to hear it.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
