The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland does not often say that a trial judge should have discharged a jury. In the case of a Belfast mother convicted of murdering her baby son, it said exactly that. It described the case as “a rare case where the judge has made an error in failing to discharge the jury,” and it traced the problem to “serious errors” which “began with the prosecution’s misconduct” and were “compounded by the expert witness and the judge.” For practising experts, it is uncomfortable but valuable reading.
The case
The defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted in 2023 of murder and attempted murder after stabbing her two young children. Identity was never the real issue; her state of mind was. Infanticide is the unlawful killing of a child under twelve months by its biological mother at a time when “the balance of the mother’s mind was disturbed”. In practice it operates as an alternative to a murder conviction, and whether it was available to her depended almost entirely on the psychiatric evidence.
She appealed on three grounds: prosecutorial misconduct, the evidence of the Crown’s psychiatrist, and the trial judge’s handling of both. In 2025 the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions and ordered a retrial. At the retrial she pleaded guilty to infanticide and attempted murder, and she was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment at Laganside Court in Belfast. Only then was the judgment published.
Two Psychiatrists, two Inherently Different Pictures
Dr Murphy, whose evidence supported the defence, was an expert in infanticide. That is a narrow field, and it went to the heart of the issue. In Dr Murphy’s opinion the mother was suffering from moderate to severe depression which substantially impaired her rational decision-making and self-control, so the partial defence of infanticide was open to her. Dr Murphy also said that she appeared to have been the inherent victim of coercive control by her partner, the children’s father.
Dr Richard Bunn, instructed by the Crown, is a forensic psychiatrist with a broad medico-legal practice. His work includes criminal reports, dangerousness and specialist risk assessments using structured tools such as the HCR-20 and RSVP, capacity assessments, and reports in family, civil, DVLA and employment tribunal matters. It is a respectable general practice, but not, on its face, a specialism in infanticide. He assessed the mother as only mildly or moderately depressed.
A disagreement about severity is not unusual, and a jury can weigh competing clinical opinions that have been properly tested. Had the evidence stopped there, there would have been no appeal. It did not stop there.
Opinion not in his Reports
An opinion first aired in the witness box. Asked about motive, Dr Bunn told the jury that the most likely reason for the killing was “spousal revenge”. According to the Court of Appeal, that theory “did not appear anywhere in his reports”. A report exists so that the other side can test an opinion and answer it; one raised for the first time orally defeats that purpose. There is also a real question whether the motive for a killing is a psychiatric matter at all, rather than an inference of fact reserved to the jury.
Where the theory came from. It emerged that Crown counsel, Richard Weir KC, had given Dr Bunn an article on spousal revenge before he testified. The two had also spoken on the telephone for almost an hour, and nothing of that call was recorded. Contact with counsel is not improper in itself; an unminuted hour-long call followed by an undisclosed new theory is another matter. Since The Ikarian Reefer it has been accepted that expert evidence should be, and should be seen to be, the independent product of the expert, uninfluenced as to form or content by the exigencies of litigation. Without a note of the call, nobody could show that his evidence met that standard. The court found that the prosecution’s conduct had “fallen below the recognised standards of good practice.” For experts the lesson is simple. If you speak to counsel before giving evidence, make a note of the conversation. If what you are given changes your view, say so in a supplementary report served before trial.
The quotation that grew. Dr Bunn’s report recorded the mother as saying, “he destroyed my life, so I destroyed his.” His original notes recorded only “he destroyed my life.” The added clause turns an expression of despair into something close to an admission of retaliatory motive, which is exactly what the spousal-revenge theory needed. Contemporaneous notes are the evidential foundation of a clinical opinion, and a report must reproduce them faithfully. In cross-examination it was put to Dr Bunn that he had lied about what she told him. After some exchanges he accepted that he had, then withdrew the concession. Either way, his credibility did not survive it. The Court of Appeal’s conclusion was blunt: “Dr Bunn’s evidence was not evidence that a jury could rely on in a case of this nature.”
Safeguards that did not hold. The problem was not hidden. During the trial the defence raised Dr Bunn’s “spousal revenge” evidence with Judge Donna McColgan and objected that it appeared in neither his notes nor his reports. They twice applied to discharge the jury, and the judge twice refused. The Court of Appeal found that she “did not pay adequate regard to this issue and appeared to minimise the import of the prosecution conduct and Dr Bunn’s evidence.” Discharge is a matter for the trial judge’s discretion, and appellate courts rarely interfere with it, which shows how serious the problem was here. For experts, it is a reminder that counsel and the bench cannot be relied on to catch every error. The overriding duty to the court is personal to the expert.
The Lessons
Little in this judgment is new law. Every opinion to be given orally belongs in the written report. Communications with the instructing party should be recorded, and any material they supply should be disclosed. A report must quote a patient exactly as the notes do. An expert should stay within his own discipline and, where the issue calls for a specialism he does not have, he unquestionably should say so. What the case shows is what happens when those duties slip. A mother stood convicted of murder when her true culpability, as her eventual plea acknowledged, lay in infanticide. The damage started with a phone call nobody minuted and a quotation that grew in the retelling.
By E.Price
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