R v Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell

Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell is now 24 years old. On 13 December 2024, she was sentenced to a total term of 10 years’ imprisonment by Garnham J sitting in the Crown Court at Ipswich. She had been tried for the murder of her child, Isabella, and acquitted by the jury of that offence. The offences for which she came to be sentenced were offences to which she had pleaded guilty at the start of the trial. They were count 3 on the indictment, an offence of causing or allowing the death of a child, contrary to section 5 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004; count 5, an offence of cruelty to a person under 16 years, contrary to section 1(1) of the Children and Young Person’s Act 1933 and count 7, another offence of cruelty under the same provision. For the offence of causing or allowing the death of Isabella the offender was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. For count 5, which involved cruelty by administering cocaine to Isabella while she was alive, there was a concurrent sentence of 6 months’ imprisonment and for count 7, which was a similar offence but involving cannabis, a further concurrent sentence of 3 months’ imprisonment. Counts 5 and 7 came to light following Isabella’s death, when toxicological analysis was carried out. The total term therefore was 10 years’ imprisonment.

We should start by saying something about the circumstances in which those guilty pleas came to be entered. The judge later determined that those circumstances justified a discount or reduction in the sentence, which would have been imposed following a trial, of a little over 28 per cent. That was a figure between the proportion which is usually described as full credit, namely one-third, and the reduced which is generally allowed when a guilty plea is entered at the first hearing in the Crown Court. In this case, as we have said, the pleas to counts 3, 5 and 7 were entered on the first day of the murder trial. That was the first occasion on which an arraignment had taken place in respect of those allegations. The situation was that this offender was accused of murder and was tried alongside a man named Scott Jeff who was also accused of murder.

When she was interviewed, following her arrest, she admitted conduct which was consistent with allowing Scott Jeff to inflict fatal violence on Isabella. That was the offence of which she was ultimately convicted. At some stage prior to the trial, her intended guilty pleas were communicated to the prosecution but, of course, they were not acceptable because the prosecution wished to continue with its murder case against her. That is why the arraignment did not occur prior to the trial as otherwise it might easily have done. That is why, although the pleas were late, the judge allowed greater credit than would usually follow in such circumstances.

This is an application by the Solicitor General for leave to refer these sentences to this Court, under section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, with a view to them being determined to have been unduly lenient and to being increased. In the context of making that application the Solicitor General does not say that the judge was unduly lenient in his determination of the extent of the credit which was due from the guilty pleas. In the written Reference that is described as “generous” but it is not described as “unduly lenient”.

It is necessary to say one further thing about the events during the trial below. Scott Jeff was convicted by the jury of murder. The prosecution case was that although Scott Jeff and this offender were at the time of Isabella’s death in a relationship with each other and both in a position where they ought to have been caring for her, only one of them inflicted injuries on her and only one of them unlawfully killed her. The jury was required to decide which of the two that was. In convicting Scott Jeff in these circumstances therefore, and acquitting this offender of murder, they also acquitted her of any form of unlawful killing. This is truly therefore a case of allowing another to cause the death of a child rather than a case of directly, by any act on her part, contributing to that death. If the prosecution had been able to prove that she had encouraged or assisted Scott Jeff in murdering Isabella, then this offender would have been convicted of murder and would be serving a life sentence. But that is not how the case was put and that is not how we must approach the case for the purposes of this Reference. For the record and not because it is of any direct relevance to anything we have to consider, we record that Mr Jeff was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 24 years and 204 days.

In May 2023 the offender renewed a relationship with Scott Jeff, with whom she had previously been in a relationship at an earlier point in their lives. In the meantime, she had formed a relationship with another man who became the father of Isabella. In May 2023, the offender decided to go with Scott Jeff and they took Isabella with them. She was 2 years and 8 months old. Over the course of about 5 weeks, Scott Jeff subjected Isabella to a series of assaults of increasing severity, of which this offender was aware and which she did nothing to stop. These assaults began perhaps at a level where their gravity may not have been of such a level as to cause very serious alarm but that did not last very long; they very soon did escalate into acts of terrifying brutality. Even when Isabella was in obvious pain and distress, her mother offered her no or no useful help. On the contrary, when they went out and about as a group of three, the offender covered up Isabella’s injuries with clothing so that people would not suspect that she was being ill-treated. After one particular horrifying and brutal episode in June 2023, Isabella died on the 26th of that month. Instead of seeking help for her, even at that stage, the offender together with Scott Jeff treated her body in a reprehensible manner, pushing it around in Isabella’s pram concealed under various items. Eventually they left her body in the bathroom of their accommodation and abandoned it. It was discovered some days later.

The Solicitor General submits that the sentences were unduly lenient. It is accepted, as it was before the judge, that the correct categorisation of this offence of causing or allowing death, for the purposes of the relevant guideline, was category 1A. That gives rise to a starting point of 14 years, with a range of 12 to 18 years. The Solicitor General submits that, having arrived at the correct range, the judge erred in his assessment of the aggravating and mitigating factors. The judge concluded that these balanced each other out, so that the sentence, if there had been a trial, would have been one of 14 years’ imprisonment. There was not, there were instead guilty pleas in the circumstances we have described and the judge gave the credit we have already referred to reducing the sentence to the 10-year term which was then imposed. The Solicitor General says, through Mr Paul Jarvis KC, who appears before us on this Reference, that this was an error. The aggravating factors in this case substantially outweighed such mitigation as there was and required, on any reasonable assessment, an increase to a sentence significantly higher than 14 years to which that credit should have been applied. It is accepted that concurrent sentences for counts 5 and 7 were appropriate but it is submitted they operated as significant aggravating factors to which also the judge failed to give sufficient weight.

The relationship between the offender and Scott Jeff which preceded these events occurred during a short time in 2019. They separated and she formed a relationship with Thomas Weildon, giving birth to their daughter (Isabella) in September 2020. In May 2023, as we have said, she went with Scott Jeff and Isabella and left their home and went to live in Great Yarmouth. It was quite soon after that that Scott Jeff began to assault Isabella physically. He used to slap her, leaving her badly bruised, and he would kick her. He appears to have thought that her potty training was going too slowly and that the time had come when she need not any longer wear nappies. This was predictably unsuccessful and that appears to have driven him into violent rages. His violence increased in its wickedness. He gave her a black eye and made her wear sunglasses to hide it. As we have said, when they went out she would wear a winter coat to hide the bruises. There came a time when he lifted her up by her arms, causing a buckling fracture to her forearms, but no medical treatment or help was sought for this child by either of these adults. This happened again on more than one occasion. He also either stamped on her or kicked her between her legs with enormous force. Each assault resulted in separate fractures to the pelvis and there was a tear to her perineum. She died 6 hours after the second of these assaults which caused a bone marrow embolism to migrate to her lung. This offender was actually present when a good deal of this violence occurred. It appears that on occasions she did remonstrate with Jeff in order to try to persuade him to stop harming her daughter but this was ineffective and she did nothing further about it. The investigation recovered some CCTV footage in which she is seen, at times when her daughter must have been in very severe distress and pain and later after she was dead, to be smiling and to outward appearances having a good time. After they had abandoned her in the way described (dead in the shower), CCTV footage showed these two together laughing and drinking in a pub. We have referred already to the admissions made in interview and to what took place during the course of the trial.

We now move on to describe the matters relevant to sentence and the sentencing exercise which the judge carried out. First of all, it is right to record that this offender had no previous convictions, cautions or any other form of criminal behaviour recorded against her.

There were victim personal statements from Isabella’s father and from other members of her family. They wrote about how she was innocent, full of joy and how she had an infectious giggle. They recorded how they simply cannot come to terms with her loss. Her father in particular is wracked by feelings of guilt because he feels that he failed her -- he did not. These are very moving documents. The judge said this:

“Listening to their accounts was heartbreaking. Isabella is described by those who knew and loved her as ‘perfect in every way,’ and, as, ‘the best reminder of the beauty and innocence of childhood.’ It is perfectly clear to me that her killing

has had a devastating effect on her family and that the lives [of] all of them will be permanently disfigured by this loss. And it is you two who are responsible for all this pain.”

We also have read these documents carefully and we fully accept all that they say. Nothing that we can say or do can give this beautiful little girl back to her loving family.

There was a pre-sentence report. In it the offender accepted responsibility for allowing Isabella’s death, in that she knew what was going on and did nothing or nothing much to try to stop it. The author of the pre-sentence report said that she had a tendency to minimise her behaviour and showed a marked lack of emotion when talking about her daughter Isabella. Her account of events sounded to the author of the report like someone reading out a set of instructions rather than discussing how their much loved daughter had been murdered by their boyfriend. The report concluded that the offender poses a high risk of causing serious harm to a child in her care. She had no real understanding of the reasons for her offending and so would be unable to address those reasons.

The judge had presided over the trial, had heard in particular the offender giving evidence over a period, as we understand it, of four days. During that time, she gave evidence in her own defence to her own counsel and was cross-examined by Scott Jeff’s counsel and also by the prosecution. Undoubtedly, that gave the judge an insight in to the offender, in to the reasons for her offending and in to her culpability, which is very difficult for us to replicate. He also had the other material to which we have referred which we of course can perfectly well assess but we cannot put ourselves in the same position as the judge in the respect that we have just identified.

The judge said in his sentencing remarks that he was dealing with a case in which the offender had allowed the death of her child rather than done anything to cause it. He considered that that meant that a downward adjustment was required to the 14-year starting point. He then addressed the fact that, in this case, there had been prolonged and repeated attacks, of which the offender had been well aware, over a period of weeks leading up to Isabella’s death, which is a particularly significant factor in this case. He decided that cancelled out the reduction which was warranted by the fact that is a case of “allowing” rather than “causing” death and returned to a starting point before allowing for further aggravating and mitigating factors of 14 years. In arriving at that position, the judge of course had in mind the way in which the case had been put before the jury, which we have already explained and the consequent significance of the jury’s verdict to the basis on which this offender fell to be sentenced. That is why he came to the conclusion that a significant reduction for the starting point was warranted in this case, although that was cancelled out by the extreme and prolonged brutality inflicted on Isabella by Jeff. He then moved on, as he was required to do by the guideline, to identify further aggravating and mitigating factors and to balance them. As aggravating factors, he identified:

Identifying mitigating factors the judge identified these:

We have already summarised the submissions made by the Solicitor General through Mr Jarvis. Those submissions are set out in a carefully drawn Reference document and have been supplemented by skilful and compassionate submissions by Mr Jarvis. We only need to refer to one part of those submissions as a matter we have not covered already. The Solicitor General criticises the approach that the judge took to one of the aggravating factors identified in the guidelines. This factor is “prolonged suffering prior to death”. We will return to how the judge dealt with that later, but the criticism is that he should have taken into account, as at step 2, as an aggravating factor and not determined that he had already given it the at step 1, where there is a similar factor relevant to the assessment of culpability for the purposes of selecting a starting point and sentencing range. The judge was obviously concerned not to double count the factor, and the submission is that actually it has two aspects to it, each of which needs to be considered separately. The culpability factor of course relates to culpability. The aggravating feature of prolonged suffering prior to death relates not to culpability but to harm and those are different things and giving each a value in coming to the sentence, does not double count. That is the submission.

Ms Sasha Wass KC, who appears before us on behalf of the offender as she did at trial, makes short but powerful submissions, arguing that the judge was aware of all the relevant factors in this case and in the best position to balance them. She submits that the judge made no identifiable error in his approach to the guideline, and notes that it was not submitted that the judge should have found that it was contrary to the interests of justice to follow the guideline. That being so he was required to follow it. She says his stepped approach, following that in that guideline, is faultless. She says that the resulting sentence is not a lenient one.

The brutality of the murder of this small child by Scott Jeff is truly sickening. For this offender (the mother of that child) to allow that to happen is an extremely serious offence. It requires a long prison sentence. It is an offence which understandably excites very strong emotion in those who loved Isabella and in anyone who hears what happened to her. This murder took her life and it has also devastated many others.

The judge took into account the fact, as we have said, that in this case the offender did not herself inflict violence on the victim but stood passively by and allowed a man to do that to such an extent that he killed her. Both of these ways of committing the offence, active participation or passive allowing, under section 5 of the Domestic Violence, Crimes and Victims Act 2004 are very serious offences. But a case where the offender is not herself responsible for inflicting, assisting or encouraging violence against the victim is somewhat less serious than those where she is, and the judge was entitled to take that into account.

In summary, there are two key points which are made on behalf of the Solicitor General. First, that the judge should have taken the nature and duration of Jeff’s brutality, both as a factor placing the case in the highest category for culpability and also as an aggravating factor because it is relevant to the harm caused to Isabella “prolonged and/or multiple incidents of serious cruelty including serious neglect” is a factor in category B for culpability, which can place the case in category A on its own, where it is extreme. In this case it was indeed extreme and it was accompanied by other category B factors and, as we have said, and nobody disputes the judge was right to put this case in the highest category for culpability. “Prolonged suffering prior to death” is an aggravating factor to be taken into account in step 2. It is submitted that the judge was wrong to decline to give effect to it separately because of the weight he had already given to it in selecting the range in the starting point at step 1. Secondly, it is submitted that the judge erred in assessing the weight of the aggravating factors and the mitigating factors and wrongly held that they balanced each other out. This is related to the first point but is a rather wider submission.

In our judgment, the critical finding made by the judge in assessing the mitigating factors was this:

“Fourth, I accept that before you reconnected with Jeff, you were a very good mother to Isabella. I have to say it is that which makes your subsequent behaviour so astonishing.

Fifth, in my judgment it is clear that you are an inarticulate, immature and, frankly, very

weak individual. You had been bullied at school, you lack self-confidence as a young adult and, in Jeff’s company, you were easily bullied and manipulated. As your counsel fairly put

it, ‘You were not very bright, you were easily manipulated, weak, gullible and eager to please.’

In my judgment these character flaws lay at the heart of this offending. You were so weak, so pathetically desperate to obtain Jeff as a boyfriend that you allowed every maternal

instinct inside you to be subverted in your desperate attempt to please Jeff. None of that can remotely provide a justification for your dreadful conduct, but it is relevant to my assessment

of your culpability.”

The judge had earlier made a finding that the offender did suffer grief as a result of the death of her child and that she had suffered from mental health difficulties. These are really the context for his conclusion from all of this material, which is that expressed as the fifth mitigating feature and set out above. This offender was weak and fell under the control of a much stronger character, who was capable of appalling violence. Had that not happened she no doubt would have carried on being a good mother to her daughter. This does not, as the judge said, excuse her dreadful conduct which inevitably must result in a very long prison sentence but it is relevant to the final judgment as to culpability and harm at step 2 of the guideline. We do not understand the Solicitor General to submit otherwise. This was a relevant factor, the submission is that it was given too much weight.

Perhaps the critical question is whether the judge was wrong to decline to take the prolonged suffering prior to death as a factor relevant to the assessment of harm because he had already taken it into account when assessing culpability. Culpability and harm are different concepts and each must be taken into account when sentencing in any case (see section 63 of the Sentencing Act 2020):

“Assessing seriousness

Where a court is considering the seriousness of any offence, it must consider—

(a)the offender’s culpability in committing the offence, and

(b)any harm which the offence—

(i)caused

(ii)was intended to cause, or

(iii)might foreseeably have caused.”

This is why the nature of the violence or neglect is mentioned both as a culpability factor and as an aggravating feature. Harm in a case where death has occurred is always at the highest level. But the fact that a child in addition to dying suffered the torment of repeated brutality, knowing that she had no-one to help her because her mother was there and allowing it to happen, is additional harm which should be reflected. The judge, of course, was fully aware of all the dreadful circumstances of this case. His observation on this issue was:

“Isabella undoubtedly endured prolonged suffering prior to death, but I’ve already taken that into account in determining my starting point.”

That starting point, before aggravating and mitigating features were balanced, at step 2 was 14 years. The judge was not saying that Isabella’s suffering was not a significant factor; he was saying that he had relied on it when taking and weighting the various factors relevant at the step 1 stage. As to that he had said:

“There were, here, prolonged and multiple incidence of serious cruelty and child neglect, and very significant force was used by Jeff, on Isabella. In my judgment not only did you fail to take any steps to protect Isabella, but you deliberately disregarded her welfare, even when the abuse, including the fatal attack was taking place, right in front of you. Most people will find your conduct incomprehensible.

I accept the submission that because you pleaded guilty to allowing rather than causing the death of Isabella, your case should fall in the lower part of the range for this offence. But I also bear in mind that you allowed numerous attacks on Isabella, in the days and weeks before the fatal attack. On that basis, my starting point could not be less than 14 years’ imprisonment.”

As long as the judge took the harm to Isabella into account, whether at step 1 or step 2 then it is impossible to say that he erred in the way alleged. It is clear from the remarks that we have just quoted that he did. This is confirmed by the way he later expressed himself. He did not say that the harm to Isabella was irrelevant; he said that, as a matter of fact he had included in the factors which required the starting point to be 14 years, in a case where the offender was not complicit herself in inflicting any of the violence.

We grant leave in this case because we consider that some judges may properly have balanced the aggravating and mitigating features differently, or applied them to a somewhat higher starting point. That is not at all the same thing as to say that the judge’s approach was unduly lenient. He really was in the best position to assess this offender and her culpability. He really did follow the guideline as the law requires him to do. He went through steps in an impeccable way and used language which showed that he was acutely aware of the appalling circumstances of the very grave case with which he had to deal. In those circumstances, we consider that it is not possible to say that his sentence before plea discount of 14 years in this case was unduly lenient and, as we have said, there is no criticism made of that discount as being in itself unduly lenient. That being so, although we give leave, we decline to quash the judge’s sentence and to replace it with any sentence of our own and we therefore dismiss the application.

LORD JUSTICE EDIS: Thank you very much for your help. The Court is very sorry for everyone who has suffered this appalling loss.