WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
“Sir, that is the evidence on behalf of Dr Polkinghorne,” defence lawyer Ron Mansfield said at the end of the questioning of associate professor Sarah Hetrick. With that, the jury finished hearing seven weeks of evidence from witnesses of both sides.
The trial of Philip Polkinghorne, the Remuera eye surgeon accused of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna, was originally scheduled to run for six weeks but the jury sat at the Auckland High Court until today, the end of the seventh week, going through lengthy evidence from a long list of prosecution and defence witnesses.
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Justice Lang has asked the jury not to come to firm conclusions one way or the other because the lawyers are yet to close and he’s got to sum up the case.
”Over this weekend, please do not talk to anyone else at all about this trial,” he said.
What happens next in the Polkinghorne trial
The next step is the closing addresses. Auckland Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock will deliver her closing address on Monday.
The defence will likely close on Tuesday, and the judge might start summing up on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning.
The function of closing addresses is for counsel to put all the evidence together in a coherent form.
The trial will resume with the Crown closing address at 10am on Monday.
Week seven draws to close with last defence witnesses
The trial closed today with evidence from associate professor Sarah Hetrick.
She is an academic at the University of Auckland, primarily a researcher, and she also holds a role with the Ministry of Health.
Hetrick says there’s no requirement for a diagnosed mental illness for someone to commit suicide. That’s another myth, suicide is not always related to a mental illness, she says.
Something like 40% to 50% of people who commit suicide in this country have had no contact with mental health services, Hetrick told the court.
She also said only about a quarter of people leave a suicide note.
Earlier, the jury heard from Dr David Menkes, a Yale-trained psychiatrist who now lives in Raglan. He says Hanna had several of the risk factors for suicide on the night before her death.
They included several days of poor and disturbed sleep. The trial has heard evidence she repeatedly sent emails into the early hours, as late as 4am, in the days before she died.
She was also taking a combination of drugs that had potentially dangerous interactions, including diet drug phentermine (an amphetamine) and the sleeping pill zopiclone, which together with wine would have created a distinct disinhibiting effect, the trial heard. Her antidepressant fluoxetine could have been another “wild card” adding to her intoxication, he said.
“It’s a whole array of different risk factors which were in combination,” Menkes said.
There was also the loss of her mother two months before Hanna’s death, which while not unexpected would still have been a major event, he said. Her sister Tracey Hanna said Pauline had reported having attempted to take her own life in the 1990s, shortly after her father’s death, but Menkes acknowledged there was no independent verification of this from medical records or other witnesses.
The trial, originally set down for six weeks, is now certain to run into next week, its eighth, when the Crown and defence will close before Justice Lang sums up and the jury retires to consider its verdict on the single charge Polkinghorne faces – murder. He pleaded guilty to charges relating to meth and a meth pipe at the start of proceedings in late July.
Before Menkes, the trial spent hour upon hour wading through the dense technical evidence underpinning a dispute between the police digital forensic analyst Jun Lee and the defence’s IT expert Atakan “Artie” Shahho.
It all boiled down to the two contacts Polkinghorne’s defence team say Pauline Hanna looked up and selected about 4am on the morning of her death, April 5, 2021.
Shahho said this means she would have at least selected the contacts from within the messaging app, and possibly also drafted and then deleted messages to them. They were her husband and the daughter of a family friend.
Lee said the defence has misinterpreted an automatic security lookup procedure to suggest the phone’s messaging app was used. In fact, it was an automatic background security process. We know that, says Lee, because there are no corresponding device logs showing the phone being moved and switched on.
To counter that, Shahho and the defence has said the device log data also does not show any logs on the afternoon of April 5, when a police photo of the scene clearly shows Hanna’s phone screen having been switched on. As a result, Shahho is questioning the accuracy of the data logs police relied on. The prosecution said Shahho has not seen the raw data, just the data from Cellebrite, the tool used to analyse the phone.
Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled Hanna, 63, inside their Remuera home before staging the scene on the morning of April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging. Prosecutors have suggested the defendant was high on methamphetamine when he lashed out at his wife of 24 years, possibly during an argument over his exorbitant spending on sex workers or his “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
The Herald will be covering the case in a daily podcast, Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial. You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through The Front Page feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.
