A woman who killed her fiance and six-year-old daughter when she crashed her car while almost double the drink-driving limit has been jailed for two years.

Carly Tomlinson had drunk two pints of lager and lime and three vodka and Cokes before she crashed the blue Fiat Panda into a stone wall in Belper, Derbyshire, in the early hours of Sunday 30 April last year.

Her fiance, James Watson, 28, and their daughter, Ruby Watson, were passengers in the car. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. Tomlinson, 24, sustained a broken back, pelvis and ribs.

Nottingham crown court heard that Tomlinson was travelling at 43mph in a 30mph zone on the two-mile journey home from the Marehay Miners Welfare Club. Her daughter was not properly secured in her booster seat and her fiance was not wearing a seatbelt.

The prosecution said she “simply had a very poor recollection of events that morning” when she was interviewed by officers in the months after the crash.

At a previous hearing, on 22 June, Tomlinson pleaded guilty to two counts of causing death by careless driving while unfit through drink. In addition to her prison term, she was disqualified from driving for four years.

The judge, Gregory Dickinson QC, told her: “In any view, this case is both serious and tragic. No one here knows why you drove. You should not have been driving. You knew that you must have had too much to drink.

“I suspect the physical injury is nothing compared to the emotional damage you have done to yourself.”

Watson’s mother, Janine Hitchcock, said she could not attend court because she was so angry with Tomlinson. In a victim impact statement read to the court by the prosecutor Alex Wolfson, she said: “[Tomlinson] needs to pay for all the heartbreak she has done. My family has been completely torn apart and I feel awful like I can’t breathe. I feel so strongly that she should be punished.”

Tomlinson’s lawyer, Raglan Ashton, said she had undergone numerous counselling sessions in an effort to come to terms with the loss of her fiance and daughter.

He said: “She understands the level of resentment towards her. She says ‘I will never forgive myself and not a day goes by when I don’t think of James and Ruby’ and given the chance she would put herself in their place.”