Lauren Dickason is mountng a defence of not guilty by reason of insanity and infanticide. Video / NZ Herald
WARNING: This story contains graphic and sensitive content.
The jury has now finished hearing all of the evidence in Lauren Dickason’s murder trial in the High Court at Christchurch.
Tomorrow they will hear a full day of final closing addresses from the Crown and defence lawyers.
On Monday they will be sent to begin deliberations after Justice Cameron Mander sums up the trial, and they get direction on how to reach their verdict.
The trial began on July 17 and over the past four weeks a jury of eight women and four men have heard extensive evidence about Dickason’s life before and after she and her family emigrated to New Zealand from South Africa a month before Liane, 6, and twins Karla and Maya, 2, died.
Dickason’s lengthy battle with a major depressive disorder, her gruelling fertility journey including at least 17 rounds of IVF and the loss of a baby early in a pregnancy, and her struggles with motherhood were canvassed.
The court was also shown video of Dickason and her husband Graham being interviewed by police after the little girls were killed.
Graham Dickason then gave evidence via audio-visual link from his home in Pretoria after he chose not to return to New Zealand to attend the trial.
Lauren Dickason during her police interview. Photo / Pool
Those first to the house after Graham Dickason found his daughters dead in their beds and those who had spent time with the family in Timaru before the alleged murders spoke in court.
And five experts gave evidence on Dickason’s mental state - two supporting the Crown case of murder and three who assessed her and believe she was insane at the time of the alleged offending and hers is a clear case of infanticide.
Today the jury heard the last of the evidence from forensic psychologist Ghazi Metoui who supported the defence of insanity and infanticide.
He was cross-examined by Crown prosecutor Andrew McRae after giving his formal opinion yesterday.
Metoui said that while the killings were “brutal, callous, determined and deliberate”, the killer cannot be held criminally responsible.
“I do not consider that Miss Dickason’s mental state at the time of the alleged offending precluded her from understanding the nature and quality of the acts,” he said.
“To the contrary, I consider that she was purposeful and deliberate throughout her offending and acted with full conscious awareness of her actions and with great determination to pursue her aims, the killing of her three young children.
“However, such was the severity of her depressive illness and associated distorted thinking at that time ... that ultimately, she thought she and her three children were better off dead.
“It is my opinion that she did not know that the alleged acts were morally wrong to the commonly accepted standard of right and wrong ... she has a defence of insanity.”
Further, he said the defence of infanticide was clear to him.
“Mrs Dickason has a history of postpartum depression following the birth of both Liane and [twins] Karla and Maya,” he said.
“My opinion is that her problems with depression in the 11-year period leading up to her alleged offending were very much embroiled in her fertility problems, losing her first child at 18 weeks gestation, antenatal anxiety and then postnatal depression that remained chronic - clinically referred to as the intermittent symptom pattern.
“She always had vulnerabilities in her earlier life since adolescence in her early 20s, and these in themselves are risk factors for developing postpartum depression.
“The fact is that declines in her mental health all occurred after 2010 from the time of trying to conceive to eventually having children.”
Graham and Lauren Dickason with their daughters before the alleged murders. Photo / Facebook
Metoui said Dickason’s family said she “never returned to her baseline mental health” after her first baby died.
“I therefore consider on a balance of probabilities that her major depressive disorder - severe type - at the time of the alleged offending was an extension and part of her chronic postnatal depression since 2015 after having Liane and re-emerging in 2019 after having Karla and Maya and episodically thereafter.
“I consider that the balance of Mrs Dickason’s mind at the time was disturbed by this specific disorder consequent upon childbirth ... she meets the medical and legal threshold for infanticide.”
When quizzed today by Crown Prosector Andrew McRae about his dealings with Dickason, Metoui was firm in his stance.
He said his opinion had not changed since he first assessed Dickason - even after sitting through every session of the trial and hearing all of the evidence.
McRae told Metoui that there had been “a reframing” of Dickason’s story over time and had effectively been given ideas about “altruistic motives” by the various clinicians treating her.
Metoui said that was not the case and any explanation given to Dickason about her state was to help her understand and to help her communicate to her husband who was also “searching for answers”.
McRae also grilled the expert on a number of other things including his assessment process, dealings with Dickason, whether she disclosed everything to him about her feelings and thoughts of harming the children and whether her disclosures were honest and complete at all times.
Metoui said it “is not the real world” to expect an accused to tell him every detail and he agreed when he found information from other sources he would take it to Dickason, which would “jolt her” recall and “then she would talk about it”.
“Memories are not perfect, they’re not always chronological, they are messy; people have difficulty retrieving them,” he said.
“Never did I find did she backpedal, start ducking and diving, become clustered, inconsistent - she was just very straight up about it.”
“With all of the information I have, with everything we know of Mrs Dickason, I well suspect there are other times she had thoughts of helping the children - I would be surprised if they were confined to just those specific times.”
McRae put to Metoui that he “needed to be careful with the information” Dickason gave him.
“This is where you and I are not seeing eye-to-eye at the moment,” the expert retorted.
“We know that memories are not complete... She was co-operating, she was doing her best - but even then, there were omissions in what she told me.”
The lawyer and expert butted heads on a number of topics with Metoui maintaining his position that Dickason did not kill her children out of anger.
“She was a really unwell woman,” he said.
“When she’s psychiatrically unwell, it’s crushing to her mental health... I would say she wasn’t functioning, she was not caring for herself... she was clinically anorexic, she was socially withdrawing from just about everybody.”
He said her choosing to kill Karla first because she had been misbehaving - hitting and biting her and throwing tantrums that day - was not a sign of anger.
“That is a step too far... she was not angry at Karla per se, I think she was perhaps angry but really upset at her crumbling family,” Metoui posed as an explanation.
The defence says Dickason was severely mentally disturbed, in the depths of postpartum depression and did not know the act of killing the children was morally wrong at the time of their deaths.
