Stockport nursery deputy manager guilty of manslaughter is sentenced to 14 years in prison

Sentencing Roughley, 37, to 14 years in prison, judge, Mrs Justice Ellenbogen KC, said the former deputy manager had considered Genevieve Meehan ‘at best a nuisance’ and at times with ‘antipathy’.

The trial at Manchester Crown Court, which lasted four weeks, heard how Genevieve was left for one hour and 37 minutes swaddled in a blanket and strapped face down to a beanbag at Tiny Toes Nursery on 9 May 2022.

The prosecutor suggested Roughley had appeared to ‘take against’ the child in the days prior when she had strapped her in a similar position, and treated her without ‘any degree of tenderness or affection’.

The court heard how Roughly was handling 10 babies alone at one point, as another staff member went home sick. Earlier in the day she had complained about the number of children the nursery manager had accepted.

Roughley, who had worked at the setting for 17 years, denied manslaughter and an alternative count of child cruelty.

In a victim impact statement read to court, Genevieve’s mother, Katie Meehan, said she felt 'dead inside' and consumed by guilt that she left her daughter in Roughley’s care.

‘My love for Genevieve cannot be put into words. I find that since she was so cruelly taken from me that words are simply inadequate. Nothing can reflect the horror of her death or the life that I now live,’ she said in a statement read by the prosecutor, Martin Reid KC.

She added, ‘How is any parent supposed to live with this. It was and is so horrifying. I don’t know how I have survived. Every day is torturous and I don’t know how I will live like this for the rest of my life. This has destroyed my family.

‘I want the world to know how loved Gigi is and how desperate I am to have her, hold her, hear her breath in my ear and for her to have her cheek next to mine. My little Gigi was and is a beautiful soul, the image of her daddy and the light of our lives.’

In a brief statement read to court by the prosecutor, Genevieve’s six-year-old sister said, ‘Every day I get punched with sadness. What this lady has done is terrible and nobody should experience this.’

Addressing Roughley from the witness box, Genevieve’s father, John Meehan, said his daughter had suffered the ‘gross indignity’ of invasive CPR and a postmortem and his family had all suffered ‘the indignity and horror of a police investigation which traumatised us afresh every day’.

Roughley’s barrister, Sarah Elliott KC, said the defendant was ‘devastated’ by her actions and that she was remorseful, despite her refusal to accept legal responsibility for Genevieve’s death.

Elliott said Roughley had an ‘unblemished’ 17-year career at Tiny Toes and that she had been ‘failed’ by the nursery’s senior management, who employed ‘far too few staff’, leaving her on occasions caring for between 11 and 16 babies on her own. She added. ‘She is not a monster.’

However, judge Ellenbogen said ‘none of that could explain or justify’ her conduct towards Genevieve. ‘Your interactions with Genevieve on the 6 and 9 May palpably lacked any care, kindness or concern for her wellbeing.’