A pregnant Chisholm woman has avoided jail after using stolen credit cards to buy hundreds of dollars' of gift vouchers to trade for drugs.
Kelly Ann Thompson, 36, was given a suspended sentence in the ACT Supreme Court yesterday after pleading guilty to seven charges of obtaining property by deception.
The court heard that in December 2010 Thompson came into possession of a credit card stolen from a car parked outside Eastlake rugby club.
She used the card to buy alcohol in Manuka before heading to the Bunnings home improvement store in Fyshwick and racking up hundreds of dollars' worth of purchases, buying glue, a can of paint, a brush and several gift cards.
On another occasion, Thompson stole a Visa credit card from another woman's mail and used it to buy fast food at Greenway and a gift voucher from SuperCheap Auto.
Thompson told the court that a friend had given her the first credit card and had accompanied her to Bunnings to buy the gift vouchers, which were then traded to a dealer for drugs.
She said she was willing to give evidence against the friend.
Thompson, who is nearly four months' pregnant, said she should be spared jail because she wanted to care for her children, including a toddler son.
But in cross-examination she agreed with Crown prosecutor Michael Clark that she had not been thinking about her then-newborn son's welfare when she committed the offences.
The court heard Thompson had just served four months' jail in NSW for similar offences.
Thompson told the author of a pre-sentence report that she had suffered a traumatic childhood marked by abuse at her alcoholic mother's hands and said she was only 12 when she helped her mother burn down the family home because the older woman believed it was haunted.
The court heard Thompson had an extensive criminal history with more than 50 offences on her record and had ''seemingly never emerged from the chaos of her upbringing''.
Defence barrister James Sabharwal told the court his client was motivated by a desire to care for her children and a full-time jail sentence would not be appropriate given her pregnancy.
He said it would also be a ''recipe for disaster'' if Thompson was sentenced to weekend jail.
Mr Clark argued that Thompson had been on a good-behaviour order when she committed the offences and had not expressed any remorse for her actions.
He said the Crown was not unsympathetic towards Thompson but others in the community needed to be deterred from committing similar fraud and a full-time jail sentence was appropriate.
Chief Justice Terence Higgins sentenced Thompson to a total of nine months' jail backdated to November 2011 to account for time already spent in custody.
He suspended the rest of the sentence and placed Thompson on a two-year, good-behaviour order.
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