Convicted murderer Keli Lane has lost her final court appeal to overturn her murder conviction.
Lane was sentenced to a minimum of 13.5 years in prison for the murder of her baby daughter Tegan, who went missing just days after she was born.
She had launched an appeal against her sentence in 2011, but that was rejected by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, three years to the day since her guilty sentence was handed down.
Her attempt to appeal the High Court was based on the grounds that the 2010 trial jury should have been able to consider a verdict of manslaughter in the sentencing, and that the Crown Prosecutor reversed an onus of proof by asking “rhetorical questions” of the jury in his closing address.
However, two justices of the High Court have denied her application.
A former water polo champion, Lane, 39, gave birth to baby Tegan at Auburn Hospital on September 12, 1996 but has always denied murdering the child.
Lane claims that she handed the child over to her biological father in the car park of Auburn hospital, but there was never ever proof that this meeting took place.
A coronial inquest in 2006 found that Tegan was likely to be dead and Lane was charged with her murder, 13 years after she disappeared.
