Constance Marten given permission to appeal against her sentence

Constance Marten has been given permission to appeal against the 14-year prison sentence that she is serving for manslaughter after her baby died while she was on the run from the authorities.

Aristocrat Marten, 39, and convicted rapist Mark Gordon, 52, were in hiding when their baby daughter, Victoria, died in a tent on the South Downs in January 2023.

They fled to prevent Victoria from being taken into care, as four other siblings had been before, their trial was told at the Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey, in London.

Marten and Gordon were found guilty of her gross negligence manslaughter, child cruelty, concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice after two trials spanning six months each.

Judge Mark Lucraft jailed them both for 14 years and imposed an extended sentence on Gordon, requiring him to serve a further four years on licence, giving him a total sentence of 18 years.

Marten has now been granted permission to appeal against her sentence and she has renewed her application for permission to appeal against her conviction for gross negligence manslaughter.

A court date is yet to be set.

Judge Lucraft accepted the prosecution case that baby Victoria died from hypothermia after being exposed to “significant cold stress”.

He rejected the defendants’ claims that Victoria was smothered in a “terrible accident” as they slept in their tent.

The offending was made worse because the baby was vulnerable and the defendants had failed to heed previous warnings.

In a televised sentencing, Judge Lucraft told the defendants: “It is clear throughout the period neither of you gave much or any thought for the care or love for your baby.”

The judge said that they had shown “arrogance” and treated Victoria to “neglect of the most serious type”.

Police began a nationwide hunt for the couple and their newborn baby after their car caught fire on a motorway near Bolton, in the Greater Manchester area, on Thursday 5 January 2023.

The defendants went “off-grid”, travelling across the country and sleeping in a tent on the South Downs where baby Victoria died some days later.

After seven weeks on the run, the defendants were arrested in the Hollingdean area of Brighton on Monday 27 February.

Two days later on Wednesday 1 March, after a desperate search, police found their baby dead amid rubbish inside a Lidl “bag for life” in a nearby disused shed.

Baby Victoria’s remains were too badly decomposed for a pathologist to be able to establish her contested cause of death.

Jurors were told that Marten had been warned before by social workers about the risk of falling asleep with a baby lying on her and that a tent was unsuitable.

At Swansea Family Court in July 2018, District Judge Marjory Taylor found that the couple had “poor decision-making skills” and a “potential to act impulsively”.

The judge said: “There are some concerns that on occasions these parents prioritise their own relationship over (their baby’s) needs.”

Until recently, secrecy surrounded the family court, with most hearings held in private and journalists banned from reporting anything about them.

But the BBC led a legal challenge which resulted in the publication of court papers from a series of hearings over five years.

The family court judgments provided important insights into the couple’s chaotic life together and the danger that judges had found that they posed to their first four children.