Mushroom Murderer Patterson Loses Appeal, Gets Life Without Parole

Erin Patterson will spend the rest of her life in prison. Victoria's court of appeal on Friday dismissed her appeal against three murder convictions and resentenced her to life with no chance of release.

The three justices, Lesley Taylor, Stephen McLeish and Peter Kidd, had heard both sides in August. They ruled on two appeals at once: Patterson's challenge to her convictions and a prosecution appeal against her sentence.

Patterson, 52, did not attend the 15-minute hearing in person. She showed no emotion on the video feed. When the judges left, she stood, picked up a book from beside her and walked off-screen. In court, relatives hugged and the detectives on the case looked elated. No one commented outside.

The original sentence

Last year Patterson was sentenced to life with a 33-year non-parole period. She was convicted of murdering her estranged husband's parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and his aunt, Heather Wilkinson, after hosting them for lunch. She was also convicted of attempting to murder Heather's husband, Ian Wilkinson, who survived the beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms after weeks in hospital.

McLeish said the court had granted leave on the first two grounds of her appeal but dismissed the appeal. It also dismissed the five other grounds her lawyers raised. The prosecutors' appeal succeeded: the original sentence, he said, did not properly reflect the seriousness of her offending.

The offending was "carefully planned and deliberate", McLeish said. He described an "elaborate series of deceptions", including claims that she had cancer, a denial that she had foraged mushrooms and lies about where they came from. In his words, it was "extraordinarily cold and calculated".

The grounds rejected

One ground concerned the jury, which had been sequestered in the same hotel as the police informant and members of the prosecution. The court called the situation "plainly unfortunate" and "highly undesirable", and said the trial judge would not have approved it had he been asked in advance. But it found no evidence of wrongdoing and no objective basis to think the jury had failed to deliver a verdict according to law.

Another ground argued that too much weight was placed on a telecommunications expert, whose evidence raised the possibility that she visited two sites where death cap mushrooms had been reported. The court found that its probative value was not outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice. It described many of her grounds as without substance, without merit or even fanciful.

The court rejected one part of the prosecution case: the argument that the trial judge erred in finding a substantial chance of solitary confinement for much of the sentence. The second ground, that the sentence was manifestly inadequate, succeeded. The judges wrote that a 33-year non-parole period "fails to reflect the calculated criminality" of three murders and one attempted murder.

Patterson is now one of only a handful of Victorian offenders given life without parole, and one of the only women in Australian history to receive it. To keep fighting her conviction or new sentence, she must apply to the high court for leave to appeal. The court gave written reasons to media later on Friday.

At the August hearing, the director of public prosecutions, Brendan Kissane KC, argued that her sentence was too lenient even though she would be in her 80s when eligible for parole. Her lawyer Richard Edney had told the court the jury arrangements were "an inexplicable and perhaps still unexplained failure of a process".

Source: The Guardian