Erin Patterson has lost her bid to overturn her convictions and been resentenced to life behind bars with no chance of release, as Victoria’s highest court handed down its decision on two appeals regarding her triple murder case.
The court of appeal ruled on the two appeals on Friday, after justices Lesley Taylor, Stephen McLeish and Peter Kidd heard arguments from her legal team and prosecutors in August.
Patterson, ۵۲, did not attend the ۱۵-minute court hearing in person, and showed no emotion on the video feed as McLeish outlined why her appeal had failed, and how the director of public prosecutions had succeeded in seeking a longer sentence.
Patterson was last year sentenced to life imprisonment, with a non-parole period of ۳۳ years, for the murders of her estranged husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and his aunt Heather Wilkinson, after she hosted them for lunch.
She was also convicted of the attempted murder of Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, who survived the beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms after spending weeks in hospital.
McLeish said the court had granted leave to appeal on the first two grounds of Patterson’s appeal, but dismissed the appeal, and dismissed the five other grounds raised by her lawyers.
He said the court granted the DPP appeal against the sentence, however, as it was clear the original sentence did not properly reflect the seriousness of her offending.
McLeish said Patterson sustained an intent to murder all four people for three weeks, from the time they were invited to the lunch, during the meal, and during the “protracted suffering and ultimate deaths that resulted”.
The offending was “carefully planned and deliberate”, he said, and involved an “elaborate series of deceptions” including claims that she had cancer, denying she had foraged mushrooms, and lying about the source of the mushrooms.
“This offending was extraordinarily cold and calculated, and stands to be denounced in the strongest possible terms,” McLeish said.
When the judges left court, Patterson also stood, took a book from beside her, and walked off-screen.
In the courtroom, family members hugged and were emotional, and detectives involved in the case looked elated. Nobody commented outside court.
Patterson now must apply to the high court for leave to appeal, should she wish to continue fighting her conviction or new sentence.
She is one of only a handful of Victorian offenders sentenced to life without parole, and one of the only women in Australian history to be given the sentence.
In August, the court heard Patterson should have been given no possibility of ever being released from prison, or a non-parole period so lengthy that she was likely to die behind bars.
after newsletter promotion
Her lawyers argued seven grounds for her appeal, including that allowing jurors to stay in the same hotel as police and the prosecution while they deliberated over their verdicts in the triple murder trial represented a “catastrophic” failure of the justice system.
Richard Edney, for Patterson, had said the failure to properly separate the jury during their deliberations was a fundamental irregularity that had denied her a fair trial.
“What we say has occurred here in the applicant’s trial was an inexplicable and perhaps still unexplained failure of a process,” Edney told the court in August.
They also argued that the trial judge, Christopher Beale, erred in ruling that photos and videos related to mushrooms and found on an SD card in Patterson’s home was inadmissible, as it tended to support her evidence that she foraged for mushrooms.
During the hearings, Brendan Kissane KC, the DPP, said that even though Patterson would be aged in her ۸۰s by the time she was eligible for parole, her sentence was still too lenient.
When asked whether a longer non-parole period would essentially damn Patterson to dying behind bars, and had “some artifice of it being life with life”, Kissane told the court: “It has its harsh aspect to it, of course, we accept that.
“But in our submission that is not a matter that is outweighed by the seriousness of the offending.”
