When an elderly client was charged with the attempted murder of her husband of more than four decades, to some, the case against her would have appeared overwhelming. That’s because she made admissions of wanting to kill him to triple-0 operators, to police at the scene, and again in a formal interview at the police station. The maximum penalty she faced was 25 years’ imprisonment.
However, to our Senior Trial Advocate Manny Conditsis, who has had extensive experience in winning what appears to many to be unwinnable cases, capably assisted by Kayla Nielsen, he could foresee how to achieve a positive outcome.
Our client and her husband had endured a strained marriage marked by years of coercive control, though no physical violence, and had lived as virtual strangers under the same roof. Months before the incident, our client discovered her husband had spent a significant portion of their life savings funding online sexual relationships, a betrayal that compounded years of emotional abuse. After confronting him one evening, with a hammer and then a knife, he sustained relatively minor injuries.
A case that looked unwinnable
On its face, the evidence against our client, including her own admissions to police, made it difficult to identify a credible defence. But Manny Conditsis, identified a path forward few practitioners would have even considered, that is the defence of involuntariness, that is, the actions, here the use of the hammer and knife, occurred whilst our client was in a state of partial or total dissociation, brought about by the years of trauma she had endured.
Manny Conditsis has a rare depth of experience in such matters, having run involuntariness defences in five of his seven Supreme Court murder trials and having argued the defence in the High Court of Australia. Working alongside Kayla Nielsen, Team Leader of our Criminal Law Division in Newcastle, the team briefed a leading forensic professor in psychiatrist whose detailed assessment concluded our client had likely been in a partly dissociated state, that her admissions were unreliable, and that she had not formed an intent to kill, at least in part because on the same day, she destroyed two firearms she was licenced to use, in fear of her husband using them on her.
When the Crown’s own psychiatric expert reached broadly similar conclusions, our team used that overlap to negotiate an extraordinary resolution, resulting in our client not spending one additional day in prison, beyond that served on remand.
The outcome
After lengthy negotiation, the Crown agreed to withdraw the attempted murder charge, and instead our client pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Critically, an essential part of the deal proposed by Manny Conditsis was that the Crown must agree not to press for any further prison time beyond the 16 months she had already spent on remand before she was given bail.
Why this outcome matters
Cases involving involuntariness and the reliability of admissions to police demand a rare combination of the psychiatric phenomena of dissociated states, how they are caused, an exceptional knowledge of the law of involuntariness, the ability to anticipate how a matter will unravel at trial, and of course, persuasive negotiation skill. This result reflects the value of having lawyers who can identify a genuine defence where others might see only an admission of guilt, and who have the credibility, built over decades, both in the courtroom, and when dealing with the Crown and the ODPP.
If you or someone you know is facing serious criminal charges, contact Conditsis Lawyers to discuss how our experience can make a difference to the outcome.
