“During the afternoon of 9 May, you put Genevieve down to sleep on a beanbag, I am satisfied — to the criminal standard — face-down, having first tightly swaddled her, so that her ability to move was severely restricted. You fastened her into a harness, further restricting her ability to move, and placed a blanket over her which at least partially covered her head. As the harrowing video and audio CCTV footage of that day shows, you left Genevieve in that position, carrying out only the most cursory and infrequent of checks, for over ninety minutes, during which time her increasing distress was readily apparent, both visibly and audibly. She can be seen desperately moving her lower body, and heard crying and coughing, in her ultimately futile struggle to breathe.
In so doing, and inevitably given your acts, she sank further into the soft and damp surface of the beanbag, became exhausted and overheated, and re-
breathed the increasingly Oxygen-depleted air around her face. I am certain that every person in this courtroom who watched the footage was willing you to pick her up, and remove her from the danger in which you had placed her, knowing, of course, that you
would not. Genevieve’s final movement was at 14:24 that afternoon. At 15:12, you
raised the alarm, having discovered that she had stopped breathing. Subsequent
aRempts to resuscitate her did not succeed and she was pronounced dead at Stepping Hill Hospital, at 16:09. The cause of death was later rectified by Dr Lumb to have been the combination of asphyxia and pathophysiological stress imparted by an unsafe sleeping environment.”