Martin's move to appeal death verdict dismissed

Euthanasia campaigner Lesley Martin's "year from hell" got worse yesterday when the Supreme Court dismissed her application for leave to appeal against her conviction for attempted murder.

Martin was found guilty in March last year of attempting to murder her terminally ill mother Joy in 1999 by giving her a morphine overdose. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison and was freed in December after serving 7 1/2 months.

In February, the Court of Appeal rejected Ms Martin's appeal. Last week Martin's lawyer, Donald Stevens, QC, told the Supreme Court Martin had not had a fair trial because the trial judge misdirected the jury on the issue of intention. This gave rise to a miscarriage of justice.

The argument Dr Stevens wished to advance on appeal was that the reliability of Martin's admissions concerning the dosage of morphine, which the jury must have accepted, should not have been taken as automatically extending to the motive for giving the morphine.

The Supreme Court at Wellington reserved its decision, which was released yesterday.

Supreme Court Justices Peter Blanchard and Thomas Gault said there was no appearance of a miscarriage of justice.

The Court of Appeal had been "alive to the separate issues of whether a lethal dose was administered, and whether there was an intention to kill".

The evidence of admissions left no reasonable room for a suggestion the injection was to relieve pain rather than to cause death.

"We have already noted that the suggestion of mistake was expressly put to the jury and must have been rejected," the judges said.

Last week Ms Martin said this year she was having the "year from hell" - worse than 2004 in which she was tried and jailed. She confirmed she had separated from husband Warren Fulljames.

The separation came weeks after her elder son was seriously injured in a car crash and her family turned off life support for her brother, Michael, injured in a separate truck smash.

- NZPA