Anne Marie Hart: Woman who stabbed strangers denied appeal
Anne Marie Hart and her friends attacked strangers in unprovoked stabbing frenzies in Melbourne. She will remain jailed for seven years.
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A woman who savagely stabbed two strangers in two separate incidents in Melbourne has lost a bid to spend less time in prison.
Anne Marie Hart is serving seven years in jail with a minimum of four for the unprovoked attacks. Her attempt to serve less was denied by the Court of Appeal on Friday.
Hart’s first victim was a woman cycling past Hart, then 17, and two friends in December 2016. They called out to the woman who stopped thinking they may need directions.
Hart suddenly put the woman in a headlock and began stabbing her in the face with a serrated fishing knife.
She stabbed her multiple times to the face, neck and chest.
She caused a “full-thickness, deep-penetrating open wound” from the victim’s lower lip to her neck along her jawbone, a four-centimetre open wound below her right ear, a four-centimetre deep wound near the collarbone and a laceration to her right eye among about 15 stab wounds.
Hart and her two friends stole about $200 from the victim.
Justices Chris Maxwell and Mark Weinberg said the victim needed extensive surgery and “became afraid to live in Melbourne, where she had been studying as an international student.”
In May 2017 Hart struck again when she and two friends approached a male near Flinders Street Station while shouting and waving a knife.
He managed to escape, but that night they lured another man to one of the women’s homes using dating app Tinder. They asked the victim, who was also a migrant, to drive them somewhere.
Hart was sitting behind the man who was in the driver’s seat. When he stopped the car, she stabbed him to the right side of his neck from behind and then stabbed him again to his forehead while her friends stabbed his arms.
He suffered at least 10 serious injuries, including “a possible piece of knife blade embedded in the skull”.
Hart and her friends inflicted a wound that went from the back of his neck to the front, a “deep, ragged wound” on his elbow, wounds to his sternum, forearm, middle finger and forehead and took his mobile phone and car keys.
He suffered permanent scarring and anxiety and had to quit his job in a warehouse due to his injuries preventing him from using his arms.
Hart plead guilty to two counts of intentionally cause serious injury, armed robbery, and theft and was imprisoned in June 2019.
When refusing the appeal Justices Maxwell and Weinberg said the original sentencing judge had been “unimpeachable with great care and sensitivity” in balancing the seriousness of the offences and the “profound physical and psychological” impact on the victims against mitigating factors.
Those included Hart’s borderline personality disorder and the PTSD she suffered as a result of “terrible abuse” when she was a small child.
Originally published as Anne Marie Hart: Woman who stabbed strangers denied appeal