Triple murderer Lauren Dickason has filed an appeal against her convictions.
The South African doctor was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment in June for murdering her three young daughters in their Timaru home.
A notice of appeal against conviction was filed by her legal team on July 23.
The grounds for the appeal are yet to be confirmed.
Post-sentencing, the murder-convicted mother has been detained in a mental health hospital, which would continue until doctors decided she was capable of coping with prison.
The judge did not impose a life sentence or order a minimum term of imprisonment.
Last year, a jury reached a majority verdict after 15 hours of deliberations at the Christchurch High Court, having heard four weeks of evidence.
Dickason, her husband Graham Dickason and their children — six-year-old Liané and two-year-old twins Karla and Maya — arrived in New Zealand from South Africa in September 2021 to start a new life.
They were released from managed isolation for Covid-19 only five days before the killings.
She’ll be detained in a mental health hospital until medical authorities deem she can cope with a prison environment. (Source: 1News)
Graham found the bodies of six-year-old Liané and two-year-old twins Karla and Maya in their beds at their temporary rental property on the evening of September 16, 2021.
He was due to start work at Timaru Hospital as an orthopaedic surgeon and had been attending a work function. While he was out, his wife gathered the girls in a bedroom, telling them they were going to make necklaces, before smothering them to death.
During her trial, Dickason relied on the defences of insanity and infanticide, with her lawyers arguing she had killed her daughters purely out of love.
"The girls' deaths have nothing to do with anger and resentment and everything to do with what was, clearly, a severe mental illness."
The Crown argued the deaths were caused by Dickason’s anger and a loss of control.
It said any disturbance of her mind as a result of childbirth "was long gone", and the explanation of the "altruistic motive" only arose after treatment at Hillmorton Hospital a month after the killings.
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