‘Big ask’ to rule out ‘accident’
A jury has been warned against making a ‘‘quantum leap of logic’’ and convicting a babysitter of murdering a child because of a lack of evidence proving her innocence.
Defence lawyer Jonathan Eaton QC said medical experts called to help prosecute Shayal Upashna Sami had lost their objectivity, closed their minds and fundamentally misunderstood the case’s history.
He told jurors in the High Court at Christchurch during the defence’s closing yesterday that medical evidence relied on the opinion of ‘‘people who were not there’’ and said it was a ‘‘big ask’’ for them to simply dismiss the idea the baby’s death may have been accidental.
Aaliyah Ashlyn Chand, 1, was critically injured at a Christchurch home on January 6, 2015, dying in intensive care the following day.
She suffered two skull fractures, brain swelling, cranial cavity bleeding and severe haemorrhaging in her eyes, as well as bruising to both sides of her face, ears and forehead.
Her babysitter, Sami, is accused of assaulting her at her flat in Worcester St, Linwood, in frustration.
The 21-year-old denies the murder, saying the child was hurt falling from a couch.
Closing the Crown’s case yesterday, prosecutor Deirdre Elsmore said ‘‘common sense’’ and ‘‘life experience’’ backed up medical evidence that ‘‘what the defendant says occurred is highly unlikely, highly improbable and, if it happened, incredibly rare’’.
She told jurors: ‘‘It doesn’t make sense in our life experience and it doesn’t make sense to the medical experts either.’’
But Eaton dismissed resorting to experience as a ‘‘dangerous way to reason on murder’’.
He told the jury the case was ‘‘unusual’’ because it relied so heavily on medical evidence. But he said finding guilt purely based on experts who claimed a cause of injury was rare and bruises were difficult to explain would be a ‘‘quantum leap in logic’’.
Elsmore told the court Sami ‘‘simply snapped that day’’, grasping the baby violently by her face – causing severe bruising – before she ‘‘slammed Aaliyah’s head to a hard surface’’.
But Eaton told the jury the prosecution had ‘‘picked theories’’ they thought they could sell to the jury and flatly ignored the evidence.
He said there was nothing to support suggestions Sami was under stress from caring for Aaliyah, instead citing her mother, husband and a friend who all said she was happy, calm and even-tempered, and that she had a close relationship with the little girl who called her ‘‘mama’’.
And he said it was ‘‘culturally insensitive, naive and offensive’’ to suggest that because she had an arranged marriage and did not often leave the home – common in her homeland of Fiji – it created such pressure that she might snap and kill a child.
Justice Rachel Dunningham sums up the two-week trial for the jury today.