Last Friday, a judge made sure Nicole Finn, the 43-year-old Iowa mother recently convicted of starving her teenage daughter to death, will spend the rest of her life behind bars.
Court records obtained by PEOPLE confirm Finn appeared before a Polk County judge and learned her fate: three life sentences, to be served consecutively.
Finn, 43, did not comment before her sentencing last week, a court official confirms to PEOPLE.
Finn was convicted in December of murder and kidnapping — charges stemming from the Oct. 24, 2016, death of her 16-year-old adopted daughter, Natalie Finn.
The mother-of-five was also convicted on two counts of kidnapping for confining two other teenagers she had adopted. She has announced her plans to appeal.
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Natalie Finn weighed just 81 pounds at the time of her death. The average weight for a teen her age and height is 125 pounds. Natalie died from cardiac arrest.
Natalie stopped walking days before her death, and was found in a soiled adult diaper. Her body had many bedsores.
According to the Des Moines Register, Judge Karen Romano called Finn’s actions inexcusable and ordered her not to have any contact with her surviving adopted children.
“The court cannot imagine what kind of mental trauma these children have suffered,” the paper reports Romano as saying.
Joseph Finn, Natalie’s father, is also charged in the case but will be tried separately in April. His attorney could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.
At trial, jurors learned that, days before her death, two of Natalie’s siblings fed her water with a syringe and tried giving her yogurt. She was found unresponsive the morning of Oct. 24, 2016.
A police detective testified for the prosecution, and detailed several of Finn’s alleged text messages about her kids, four of whom she adopted.
“They are worthless,” Finn allegedly wrote in a March 2, 2016, text. “I can’t stand them. … so done with this s—.”
Finn’s defense argued that her adopted children had behavioral issues that were overwhelming her.
Some of her texts, the detective testified, seemed to show more concern for stray animals than for her kids. For example, she complained about people who abandoned their pets to become dehydrated and starve.
One of her kids testified during the trial that she was once so thirsty, she drank from a toilet.
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Prosecutor Bret Lucas told the Register he felt justified in requesting consecutive life sentences for Finn.
“If there was ever a case deserving consecutive life sentences, this would be that case,” he told the paper.