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After almost 11 weeks, a jury has found Erin Patterson guilty of murdering three relatives and attempting to murder a fourth by lacing a beef wellington lunch with poisonous mushrooms.
The guilty verdict read out in the Morwell court on Monday was swift. Yes, they said, guilty of murdering Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson. Yes, they said – to the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, the pastor who had lost his wife.
This will not be the last of it, however – Patterson’s sentencing is still to come, as well as a possible appeal.
So what happens now?
The sentencing comes first, with the court likely to reconvene sometime in the next month, says Emeritus Professor in Law at the University of South Australia Rick Sarre.
“The court will reconvene,” he said. “[Patterson will] sit there, and the judge will ask for sentencing submissions.”
At this point, the defence would typically ask for a pre-sentence report, Sarre said.
The pre-sentence report is often an independent psychological evaluation, but it could also include an analysis on the defendant’s rehabilitation prospects, her background, criminal history, health or other mitigating factors that could help determine an appropriate sentence.
The matter will then be set down for a future date, and when the reports come in they will be delivered to the judge and court will reconvene.
The submissions on the sentence from the prosecution and defence will then be heard by the judge.
“Then the judge will consider [Patterson’s] sentence and probably come back another week later and deliver the sentence,” Sarre said.
What sentence could Erin Patterson face?
The last triple-murderer to be sentenced in Victoria was Robert Farquharson, who was convicted of murdering his children in 2007 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 33 years.
Maximum penalty sentences are scaled, with murder and trafficking large quantities of drugs sitting at level 1 – which attracts the highest penalty.
“The maximum sentence is life imprisonment, and I’m anticipating that she’ll get a life sentence, and then it just comes down to what the non-parole period will be,” Sarre said.
In Victoria, the minimum non-parole period for murder, if the offender has other convictions, is 30 years.
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“I’m guessing the non-parole period will be between 30 and 37 years. You have countenanced the fact that there is not just one murder,” Sarre said.
Patterson is 50 years old, which means her prison sentence could see her incarcerated into her 80s.
In general, Australian courts try to avoid “crushing sentences” that destroy “any reasonable expectation of useful life after release” Sarre said. The criminal court has found sentencing should be “neither too harsh nor too lenient. Just as totality is applied to avoid a crushing sentence”.
“In comparison, the Americans have this funny system that if you get three life sentences, you have them sequentially,” Sarre said. “That’s kind of quaint, because if they’re 50, they’re not going to live till they’re 140.”
“We don’t just stack them up. We don’t say 30 plus 30 plus 30.”
What about the possibility of appeal?
From the date of her sentence, Patterson’s legal team have 28 days to decide if they are going to appeal.
The legal team can appeal against the sentence or the verdict. If they choose to appeal against the conviction, her team has two options – the first is in arguing there was an error in the way in which Justice Christopher Beale summed up the case to the jury.
“You just don’t get appeal as a right,” Sarre said.
“You actually have to establish through the filtering process whether you will waste the court’s time in putting an appeal up.”
The second ground would be to appeal against a judgment if “no jury properly instructed could have reached that particular verdict”, which was the grounds for appeal used successfully in the George Pell case.
