MP Karyn Paluzzano gets to leave home Disgraced former MP Karyn Paluzzano leaving court / Pic: John Grainger Source: The Daily Telegraph FORMER state MP Karyn Paluzzano yesterday won her appeal against a home detention sentence for rorting parliamentary payments and then lying to the corruption watchdog. Paluzzano was sentenced last October to 18 months detention, with a non-parole period of 12 months. But ruling on her appeal in the District Court yesterday, Judge Anthony Blackmore described the penalty as "excessive," quashed it and gave her a 14-month suspended sentence in its place. The former Penrith MP pleaded guilty in June to falsely claiming parliamentary sitting-day relief payments between 2006 and 2007, as well as giving false and misleading evidence to a 2010 corruption inquiry into the payments.Paluzzano had blamed her busy schedule as an MP for signing the allowance claim forms without reading them and "stress" for then lying to ICAC about them. Her husband Robert Paluzzano had told the court she was a "highly intelligent and capable woman" who would struggle being kept at home and unable to do the work she loved. Judge Blackmore said he understood that Paluzzano's new career as a teacher, in jeopardy because of her punishment for rorting the relief claims and lying to ICAC about it, was important to her and that she had no desire to return to politics. "I accept that the appellant is completely reformed," he said. She admitted signing some forms, knowing they were false, and signed others that were blank. She quit parliament on May 5, 2010, after admitting she lied to ICAC during their inquiry the previous month. She said at her sentencing in the Downing Centre Local Court last year that she was "extremely, extremely regretful and sorry" for what happened. But the magistrate who ordered the home detention said she had made repeated attempts to minimise or deny the full extent of the criminality of her behaviour. She wept as she walked out of the court and was comforted by a group of supporters.