A pet owner who threw her emaciated dog off a cliff while still inside her kennel has avoided time behind bars following a successful court appeal.
Kaylah Jade Williams, 35, was sentenced to a minimum of seven months in jail in August after a jogger heard her 13-year-old bulldog, Zoe, howling at the foot of a cliff on Mount Keira, near Wollongong, at the beginning of 2023. .
NSW SES teams found the dog severely underweight and with a maggot-infested open wound caused by a tumor in her stomach at the time.
Zoe was so sick that a veterinarian had to put her down to end her pain.
At the sentencing in August, Magistrate Mark Douglass said Williams’ “callous indifference to a living creature” justified a prison sentence.
But Williams successfully appealed his sentence in the Wollongong District Court on Friday to avoid the full-time custody component of the sentence.
Instead, his sentence was increased to 16 months, with a non-parole period of 12 months, served in the community as part of an intensive corrections order.
She reportedly cried when Judge William Fitzsimmons SC read the grounds of her appeal to the court, claiming that Williams threw her dog from the top of the cliff because he did not have the money to humanely put her down.
Wollongong mother-of-four Kaylah Jade Williams (pictured) was sentenced to prison in August but appealed and will not spend a day behind bars.
An SES team (pictured) removed the pet from the area and discovered it was unable to lift its body and had a large tumor with an open wound.
“The appellant was in extremely difficult financial circumstances at the time of the offence, having lost her job amid the Covid pandemic in circumstances where she was a single mother of four young children,” he said, reported. news.com.au.
The judge noted that she had been “excluded” from her community because of the crime.
In the end, he considered it unlikely that she posed any further risk to the community.
Williams pleaded guilty in July to torturing and causing the death of the bulldog after trapping it in a kennel and throwing it over the edge of a cliff, although he initially pleaded not guilty and denied any involvement after his arrest last April.
In his sentencing, Judge Douglas described the act as torture, Mercury Illawarra reported.
“Intentionally housing a dog inside a kennel, transporting it in a trailer to the area… and then tipping the kennel over the edge of what is a very steep slope offends our community’s basic sense of humanity and decency,” he told Williams. .
The runner who found the bulldog heard his screams from the bottom of the cliff.
The subsequent police investigation showed CCTV footage of Williams reversing his silver Honda CRV out of his partner’s property, with a kennel loaded on a trailer.
It also showed Williams’ return to the property two hours later with no sign of the kennel in the car or trailer.
Kaylah Jade Williams narrowly avoided time behind bars after a successful appeal on Friday.
The dog was found at the base of a cliff near Clive Bissell Drive (pictured) in Mount Ousley.
After reading Williams the outcome of his appeal, he told him he would face full-time custody if he breached any of the ICO’s conditions.
He clarified that Williams had still been sentenced to a prison term.
‘Although I have determined that the period of imprisonment will be served by an intensive community corrections order, there should be no doubt that if you breach any of the conditions (of the ICO)… you understand that you could “find yourself again.” where you were in prison full time.”
Williams was ordered to complete 300 hours of community service.