A Milton mother who crashed and caused her son serious injuries claims the methamphetamine in her blood came from her drink being spiked on a Tinder date.
Bayley Joyce Carr (27) was driving on State Highway 1 at Waihola at 115kmh when she failed to negotiate a bend and veered into the verge on the wrong side of the road.
The defendant overcorrected and ended up slamming her Mazda into an embankment on the left side before the car spun out of control and ended up back on the other side of the highway.
Carr's young son had a large laceration over his eye that required 21 stitches and left him with a visible scar.
He also suffered two broken fingers and a fractured pelvis.
Carr told police she could not remember what had happened just before the accident but analysis of her blood found the class-A drug methamphetamine.
She said she had met a man through the dating app Tinder and he must have put the substance in her drink.
"How plausible is it that the drink was spiked?'' Judge John Macdonald asked at the Dunedin District Court yesterday.
Defence counsel Brendan Stephenson said there had been a witness to the alleged incident but the woman would not provide a statement or give evidence.
The judge acknowledged there was no way to determine how much methamphetamine was in the defendant's system or when she had consumed it.
Whether it was the cause of the crash mattered little.
"I approach it on the basis you were driving too fast and there was some inattention involved,'' Judge Macdonald said.
While the woman was being sentenced on a charge of careless driving causing injury with evidence of a controlled drug in her blood, there was further punishment.
The court heard there had been a "dramatic change'' in the victim's behaviour since the crash and Carr also had flashbacks to seeing him lying in hospital.
"I'm sure one of the main penalties in this is the fact you have to live with the situation that you were the one who caused these injuries to your son,'' the judge said.
Carr was currently serving a sentence of community work for previous dishonesty offending.
Judge Macdonald was reluctant to impose further hours since she was struggling to complete that sentence.
Carr got six months' supervision and five months' community detention. She was banned from driving for a year.
