An offender's low intellect or mild intellectual retardation provides little basis for mitigation in sentencing for sexual offences against children where the offender understood the wrongness of the conduct and the intellectual deficit merely enabled denial and self-justification rather than reducing moral culpability. A voluntary confession to police and early guilty plea, while a substantial mitigating factor, cannot reduce a sentence for serious intra-family sexual offending to a level that fails to reflect the gravity of the offending.
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