A female teacher spared jail despite admitting to having sex with her 16-year-old student in the backseat of her car will remain free despite community outrage.
Monique Ooms, 31, of Maffra, was sentenced on March 24 by County Court of Victoria Judge John Smallwood to a four-year community corrections order, with 300 hours of community work for the crime.
That sentence was promptly appealed by Victoria’s Office of Public Prosecutions amid claims the judge got it wrong.
Monique Ooms nurses her ‘baby bump’. She had claimed to be infertile during a pre-sentence plea hearing
Monique Ooms, 31, of Maffra repeatedly had sex with her young student. She got pregnant soon after her sentence
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of Victoria Court of Appeal dismissed that appeal, allowing Ooms to walk free yet again and granting her costs be paid.
Sitting in the dock with the hand of a supporter on her shoulder, Ooms began to cry as the decision was handed down.
In handing down their ruling, Justices Richard Niall, Maree Kennedy and Cameron Macaulay found Ooms was entitled to leniency due to a mental condition they agreed contributed to her offending.
‘In our view, having regard to the seriousness of the offence, the matters personal to the respondent and the correct application of the sentencing purposes, the sentence imposed by the judge, whilst lenient and perhaps merciful, was not wholly outside of the range of dispositions reasonably open to him,’ the judges stated.
The court had heard Ooms had been depressed about being infertile when she decided to bed her victim.
But in July, it was revealed she had fallen pregnant the very week she was sentenced in the County Court of Victoria.
Ooms had pleaded guilty in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley County Court to four counts of sexual penetration of a child under her supervision and care.
Her barrister Jason Gullaci, SC told the Court of Appeal Ooms’ pregnancy was the most ‘significant factor’ of her latest defence.
Psychological reports tendered on Ooms pre-sentence hearing claimed the sex offender had been in a ‘fragile mental state around the time of the offending’.
‘The respondent found out that she was infertile, which increased her own vulnerability to irrational thinking to which she was disposed because of a constellation of mental health conditions afflicting her,’ the court heard.
Psychologist Megan Rodgers claimed Ooms was ‘experiencing a high level of personal vulnerability which led her to poor decision making regarding the nature of the relationship with the victim’.
Dr Suzanne Williams was of the view that Ooms’ low self-esteem and poor sense of self significantly contributed to immature and poor judgment in making decisions about relationships.
Monique Ooms leaves the Supreme Court of Appeal on Tuesday in Melbourne
Ooms had used her own wretched upbringing to convince psychologists she was not responsible for her perverted actions.
The court heard she had been raped in 2018 and involved in several relationships with men that involved ‘a degree of either degradation or abuse’.
The judges accepted that because of her childhood difficulties, Ooms had been diagnosed as having a complex post-traumatic stress disorder, diagnosis of bipolar, extreme anxiety and extreme depression.
‘The judge found that the collection of circumstances leading to her offending produced an “unusual situation”,’ the Court of Appeal found.
‘Her risk of re-offending was low and her rehabilitation was already underway. Balancing all considerations, we are not persuaded that the four-year community correction order with its onerous conditions was, in all of the circumstances of this particular case, a manifestly inadequate sentence.’
During her initial sentence, the court heard Ooms’ young victim – who was just a few weeks short of turning 17 – had snuck out in the dead of night to have sex with his then school teacher.
The 16-year-old had been grieving the loss of a close friend who died in a fatal car crash the week before and was in a ‘vulnerable situation emotionally’.
The court heard Ooms had preyed upon her student in the weeks after his friend was killed.
While the pair initially chatted over social media and phone, before long Ooms was texting her student photos of herself in her underwear.
In July last year the pair shared their first kiss and discussed all the things that were wrong with what had occurred.
The next time they met the pair had sex in the back of Ooms’ car while parked in a forest at night.
The court heard Ooms had sex with her student at least four times over the next few weeks in the backseat of her car before arranging hook-ups at her home.
Monique Ooms made it known to her sentencing judge that she couldn’t get pregnant. Then she did
Ooms was duped by police into getting into a text exchange with a friend where she made admissions
The 31-year-old appears to have embraced her new tradie life and has posted photos of herself wearing an Akubra in front of a 4WD on her social media pages
The former teacher (right) had reached out to the student after noticing he was more withdrawn and offered her Instagram handle, and later her phone number
Ooms’ grubby relationship was discovered when someone wrote two letters to the school principal, who promptly alerted police.
While Ooms initially attempted to deny her antics, she eventually confessed to police after she was duped into making admissions to a friend via text message.
The court heard when asked ‘You did actually do it, didn’t ya?’ she responded ‘Yeah’.
In bringing on the appeal, Crown prosecutor Elizabeth Ruddle, KC argued Ooms should have been jailed due to the fact she used her good character to get a job as a teacher in the first place.
She further claimed Judge Smallwood might have acted differently had the accused teacher been male.
‘One thing that strikes me when you read (Judge Smallwood’s) reasons, if you swap the genders of the complainant and the offender some of the statements would be pretty concerning around lack of the presumption of harm for instance,’ she told the Court of Appeal.
‘This is serious offending, multiple occasions, it’s planned, there’s unprotected sex on a number of occasions, and that seems to be swept away sometimes when the complainant is a male victim, but in my respectful submission it ought not be.’
Ooms had faced a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.
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