Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

This week, David Rhodes secured the acquittal of his client AW on an allegation of Attempted Murder. The jury unanimously returned a verdict of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity after only 20 minutes of deliberation at the Crown Court at Warwick.

This was a particularly sad case. In June 2021, an 85 year old man was sitting in his kitchen having a cup of tea with a friend when his next door neighbour AW, a 40 year old Polish woman knocked on the door. The neighbours had only known each other to pass brief pleasantries. The old man had given her a box of apples from his garden. There was no animosity between them. When AW came into the kitchen, she started crying, threw a jar of marmalade and a ‘good kettle’ at him, before asking him to come outside because she had a ‘Christmas present’ for him (this was June). Once outside, she went into her house before returning with two boxes of kitchen knives. AW then stabbed her elderly neighbour three times, eviscerating his bowel. As the police arrived, on BWV footage she could be heard saying “I want to kill him” before going on to speak floridly in Polish about the BBC, the Mafia, oral sex and her cat. In the police car, she could be seen responding to voices in her head. In custody, she was observed to behave in a very disturbed manner, expressing bizarre beliefs about her cat.

AW had originally been represented by solicitors who served an expert report from someone who was not qualified in the field of forensic psychiatry.

David Rhodes was later instructed by Nora Talbi of EBR Attridge LLP, a fresh solicitor who took a grip of the case. Together, David and Nora marshalled excellent psychiatric reports by Professor Andrew Forrester, from Cardiff University and persuaded the Secretary of State to transfer AW from prison to hospital for assessment. Over several months, her condition was dramatically transformed by therapy and anti-psychotic medication.

The jury heard evidence from three eminent forensic psychiatrists (including her responsible clinician) who, by the end of the trial, all broadly agreed that at the time of the incident, AW was suffering from a disease of the mind (Paranoid Schizophrenia) causing a ‘defect of reason’ (experiencing hallucinations, persecutory delusions etc) such that whilst she knew the nature and quality of her actions, she did not appreciate that what she was doing was legally wrong.

The jury heard powerful evidence of AW’s decline into insanity in the days leading up to the incident.

According to psychiatrists, it is a very rare achievement to secure a verdict of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.