Woman cleared in abortion case

By Max Aumora Jr
Teacher links curriculum to bad student behaviour The Supreme Court has freed a woman convicted of committing abortion after finding that she was wrongly charged.
A three-man bench comprising Judges Les Gavara-Nanu, Kingsley David and Robert Lindsay, quashed a decision by the Buka National Court in Bougainville and freed mother-of-two Leoba Devana who had pleaded guilty and sentenced to four years imprisonment. The court ruled that she was charged under Section 312 of the Criminal Code Act under which no abortion charge could be brought.
The Supreme Court found that Devana had exceptional circumstances and should have been charged under section 225(2).
The court found that Devana had clear legal grounds which merited a review of her conviction and that it was in the interestsof justice to review her it.
The Supreme Court ordered that the decision of the National Court be quashed, Devana be acquitted and released.
Devana was four months pregnant when, with her husband, aborted her unborn baby with the assistance of a health worker in Arawa.
The health worker provided them with cytotec tablets.
Cytotec is a medication used to end a pregnancy.
Devana pleaded guilty in the National Court, saying that she was forced to abort her unborn child because she was still recovering from birth 11 months earlier and if she carried the baby to the full term she would not survive.
She was convicted in Sept 2015 and sentenced in October to four years imprisonment, with three of those four years on parole.
She served one year and was released.
Devana was on parole when she filed her application for review of her conviction by the Supreme Court in May 2016.
The court granted her leave that month.
Her review was heard in August 2016 and the decision was handed down on Tueday last week.