Queensland’s attorney general, Deb Frecklington, will appeal to the high court to increase the sentence for Emma Lovell’s murderer.

Lovell was stabbed to death after a home invasion by two teenagers on Boxing Day in 2022. The case became a flashpoint amid a statewide debate about youth crime.

A teenager – who cannot be identified because he was 17 at the time of the offending – was convicted of her murder in 2024 .

The Queensland supreme court justice Tom Sullivan sentenced him to serve 14 years in prison, with a non-parole period of 70% of his total sentence, the maximum possible for a child under state law.

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Sullivan found that the murder was “particularly heinous”, a legal standard required at the time to sentence children to longer than 10 years’

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