Jessica Camilleri who decapitated her mum has sentenced reduced

A woman who killed her mother before carrying her decapitated head into the street outside her Sydney home is set to be released from prison years early after successfully appealing her sentence.

Jessica Camilleri was found not guilty of murder in 2021 and was instead sentenced to a lesser charge of manslaughter due to “substantial mental health issues,” including ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

An autopsy on 57-year-old Rita Camilleri revealed “at least 100 stab wounds,” including wounds that passed through the right eye socket and into the brain, after the 25-year-old attacked her mother with seven different knives.

Camilleri told police at the time of her arrest that she had acted in self-defense and that her mother had tried to kill her. However, she later admitted to a forensic psychologist that she “hacked like a butcher” and twisted her mother’s head off.

She was sentenced in March 2021 by a Sydney court to 21 years behind bars, with a non-parole period of 16 years.

In Sydney’s High Court, Judge Peter Hamill on Monday rejected claims that Camilleri’s sentence was “manifestly excessive” and that the sentencing judge misjudged the “gravity” of the crime.

Judge Hamill nevertheless ruled that Camilleri should be re-sentenced, with support from Justices Christine Adamson and Richard Cavanagh.

“Objectively, the facts were horrific and brutal and involved a frenzied attack on an innocent victim in her own home,” Judge Hammil said.

On the other hand, the offense was spontaneous and the result of Camilleri losing control of herself due to her complex psychiatric illness.

Her behavior of walking into the street with her mother’s head and dropping it, as well as asking emergency personnel if they could reattach it, showed how much the applicant’s behavior was divorced from the real thing. world.’

Based on the evidence of multiple psychiatrists and a psychologist, Judge Hammil found that Camilleri had only a “simple understanding” of moral wrongdoing due to her intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder.

He ordered that she be re-sentenced to 16 years in prison, with a non-parole period of 12 years.

Rita Camilleri suffered at least 100 stab wounds from seven different knives during the attack by her daughter

The court was told that the frenzied attack began after Camilleri became dissatisfied on July 20, 2021 with a young relative in the house where she lived with her mother, for whom she was the sole caretaker.

“A neighbor saw Camilleri” yelling and throwing her arms around, and “cursing and yelling at her mother” for “always embarrassing” her, the police’s agreed facts reveal.

The pair continued to clash after a family doctor told Camilleri she had stomach problems, with Rita insisting that her daughter be taken to hospital. Camilleri ripped her mother’s phone when she tried to call an ambulance.

Camilleri followed her mother and a struggle ensued in the bedroom, police said.

Camilleri knocked her mother to the ground, dragged her into the kitchen by her hair and stopped her.

She then used a number of kitchen knives to “inflict an undetermined but very large number of knife blows on her mother’s head and neck, eventually decapitating Mrs. Camilleri at the C2 vertebra.”

Camilleri decapitated her mother and threw her head into a nearby neighbor’s front yard

A family member tried to stop the attack.

He jumped on Camilleri and lunged at her with the cardboard lid of a toy box.

“When the applicant went to push it (relative) off her, she caused a deep wound in his cheek and cut open his head and hands,” the agreed facts state.

“It (family member) vomited somewhere during the incident.”

After decapitating her mother, Camilleri threw the head into a nearby neighbor’s front yard

The sentencing judge ruled in 2021 that “the attack on Rita Camilleri was completely unprovoked.”

“(The attack) represented nothing more than an expression of the perpetrator’s anger at her mother for her attempt to call an ambulance,” they said.

Camilleri will be eligible for parole starting July 20, 2031.