WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
The trial of Philip Polkinghorne, the Remuera eye surgeon accused of murdering his wife Pauline Hanna, will resume this morning at the Auckland High Court, with the defence case expected to draw to a close.
Today at 10am it is expected the court will continue to hear from one of the final defence witnesses, 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.
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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.
