When Women Kill: Two NSW Cases Raise Difficult Questions About Violence, Responsibility and Justice
Two extraordinary cases decided by the NSW Supreme Court within 24 hours of each other deserve considerably more scrutiny than they are likely to receive.
They are very different cases legally. They should not be conflated. But together they raise uncomfortable questions about how our justice system understands violence committed by women, particularly within families, and about whether the principles we apply to domestic and family violence are as gender-neutral in practice as they ought to be.
In the first case, 55-year-old Nirmeen Noufl killed her 62-year-old husband, Mamdouh Noufl, in their Sydney home in May 2023. She subsequently dismembered his body, placed his remains in garbage bags and disposed of them in rubbish bins. His body has never been recovered. (ABC News)
Noufl was originally charged with murder. Shortly before her murder trial was due to begin, however, prosecutors accepted a plea to manslaughter on the basis of excessive self-defence. According to the agreed facts, Noufl told psychiatrists that an argument had become violent, that her husband pinned her down and choked her, and that she stabbed him once while believing her life was in danger. The Crown accepted that it could not disprove that account. (ABC News)
On 18 September, Justice Peter Hamill sentenced Noufl to six years and three months’ imprisonment, with a non-parole period of three years. Because she has already spent time in custody, she will become eligible for parole in October 2027. (ABC News)
The circumstances following the killing are difficult to reconcile with any ordinary understanding of a momentary act of excessive self-defence.
According to the agreed facts reported by the ABC, Noufl dismembered her husband’s body and disposed of his remains. There was cleaning of the scene. Renovation work was subsequently arranged, including replacement flooring. Messages were sent from Mr Noufl’s phone to create the appearance that he remained alive, and when police investigated his disappearance, Noufl denied knowing what had happened to him. (ABC News)
Justice Hamill himself described the disposal of the body as both “thorough” and “brutal”, and characterised Noufl’s conduct following the killing as remarkable and chilling. The judge nevertheless found that the Crown had not established beyond reasonable doubt that Noufl intended to kill her husband. Evidence concerning childhood dysfunction and domestic violence within the marriage was also relevant to sentencing. The couple’s children described the relationship as gravely abusive and involving violence, manipulation and coercive control. (ABC News)
Those matters cannot simply be dismissed. If a person genuinely believes that he or she is facing death or serious injury, self-defence is a fundamental legal principle. Evidence of prolonged abuse can also be highly relevant to understanding both the immediate circumstances of an offence and an offender’s state of mind.
But that does not end the discussion.
Mr Noufl is dead. His remains were cut apart and discarded. His family has no body to bury and no grave to visit. The killing was followed not merely by panic lasting a few minutes, but by substantial steps to conceal both the death and what had happened afterwards. A non-parole period of three years inevitably raises a legitimate public-policy question about proportionality.
A mother who killed two children
The second case, decided the previous day, is legally quite different and needs to be described carefully.
In September 2024, a mother in the Blue Mountains stabbed her two sons, aged nine and eleven, to death. Their father subsequently discovered the children in the family home.
On 17 September 2026, Justice Richard Cavanagh found the mother “act proven but not criminally responsible” on the basis of mental health impairment. This is not the same as finding that she did not kill the children. The court expressly found that she did.
The psychiatric evidence was unusually consistent. Three psychiatrists who examined the woman concluded that at the time of the killings she was suffering from such severe major depression that her thought processes had become psychotic. The evidence was that she knew what she was physically doing but did not understand that what she was doing was wrong. Her thinking had become nihilistic, including a belief that her children would be better off dead. (ABC News)
The court was applying the NSW law governing criminal responsibility where severe mental impairment removes a person’s capacity to understand that an act is wrong. Justice Cavanagh described the psychiatric evidence as displaying a high degree of similarity, if not unanimity.
She is to be detained at a location determined through the Mental Health Review Tribunal. According to the court, she cannot be released unless the Tribunal is satisfied that her release would not seriously endanger her or another member of the public.
It would therefore be inaccurate to describe this case simply as a mother killing two children and “getting away with it”. A forensic mental-health detention can be lengthy, and unlike an ordinary prison sentence it does not necessarily come with a predetermined release date.
Nevertheless, the case raises another difficult question: how society conceptualises female violence within families.
Would we tell these stories the same way if the sexes were reversed?
That is the uncomfortable question worth asking.
Imagine a husband killing his wife, cutting her body into pieces, disposing of those pieces through suburban rubbish collections, replacing parts of the house, sending messages from her telephone to suggest she remained alive and denying knowledge of her disappearance.
Now imagine that man’s account was that his wife had abused and controlled him and had attacked him immediately before he killed her.
Would Australian public discussion instinctively place his claimed victimisation near the centre of the story? Would coercive control become an important contextual explanation? Would a three-year non-parole period be regarded as an unsurprising outcome?
Perhaps the evidence would justify precisely the same legal result. Equality before the law requires accepting that possibility.
But equality also requires asking the question.
The same intellectual discipline should apply when parents kill children. Mental illness is real, psychosis is real, and the criminal law has recognised for centuries that there are circumstances in which a person who physically commits a terrible act cannot fairly be held criminally responsible in the conventional sense.
That principle should apply equally to men and women.
The important question is whether it does.
Domestic violence policy must survive the gender-reversal test
Australia has invested enormously in understanding domestic and family violence through concepts including coercive control, power imbalance, victim trauma and patterns of abuse.
Much of that work has been valuable.
But a genuinely evidence-based domestic violence system cannot begin with the sex of the alleged perpetrator and work backwards.
If coercive control matters when a woman experiences it, it matters when a man experiences it. If trauma changes the way victims respond to danger, that principle cannot logically depend upon the victim’s sex. If mental illness can fundamentally affect criminal responsibility, the threshold must be clinically and legally consistent irrespective of whether the accused is a mother or a father.
And if killing an intimate partner is among the most serious manifestations of domestic violence, that description should not disappear merely because the person who died was male.
This is not an argument for treating female offenders more harshly because they are women. Nor is it an argument for treating male offenders more leniently.
It is an argument for consistency.
Victims should not become invisible
There is another danger in cases involving complex explanations of offender behaviour: the victim can progressively disappear from the story.
Mamdouh Noufl was not merely somebody’s allegedly abusive husband. He was a human being who was killed, dismembered and denied a burial. His relatives described the continuing anguish of having no resting place at which they can remember him. His family also provided evidence describing positive qualities that sat alongside the allegations made about his behaviour within the marriage.
Given the way the crime scene was cleaned up and the body dismembered, we only have the perpetrator's version of the story that she was acting in self-defence. There's no meaningful forensic examination that could be conducted of a crime scene long after the victim had been removed.
Two boys aged nine and eleven were not simply the tragic products of their mother’s psychiatric illness. They were children whose lives ended violently in their own home.
Recognising the circumstances of an offender should never require erasing the humanity of the dead.
Making the story all about the mental health of the perpetrator helps nobody.
Australia’s domestic and family violence debate desperately needs that capacity to hold two ideas simultaneously: perpetrators can themselves have histories of abuse, trauma or severe mental illness, and their victims still matter.
The events of 17 and 18 September illustrate why simplistic narratives about family violence are dangerous.
One case involved a woman who killed her husband and received a sentence that makes her eligible for parole after roughly four years in custody, despite extraordinary conduct in concealing and disposing of his remains. The other involved a profoundly mentally ill mother whom the court found had killed her two children but who, because of psychosis, was not criminally responsible under NSW law and will instead remain subject to forensic mental-health detention.
The legal reasoning is different. The human consequences are equally irreversible.
The broader question is whether Australia’s family violence and criminal justice systems are prepared to examine female violence with the same seriousness, scepticism, compassion and evidentiary rigour that we should demand in every case.
Justice should be capable of recognising abuse.
It should be capable of recognising mental illness.
But above all, it should be blind to sex.
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