Man found 'guilty but insane' in landmark verdict

A 50-year-old Kildare man has been found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity by a jury at the Central Criminal Court - the first time in Irish legal history such a verdict has been returned.

The new verdict is a result of legislation which came in in June under the Criminal Law (Insanity) Act 2006 and it replaces the former verdict of "guilty but insane".

The jury of seven men and five women took just under half an hour to reach their verdict.

John Egan, from Poplar Grove, Naas, Co Kildare, had pleaded not guilty to murdering 46-year-old Francis Ralph, a mother-of-three, at a taxi rank in Naas on August 18 last year.

Under provisions made in the new Act, Mr Justice Paul Carney directed that he be kept at the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum pending a review of his case.

Egan, who suffers from a rare form of motor neurone disease and communicates with the aid of a machine, did not show any sign of emotion as the verdict was read out.

Dr Harry Kennedy, clinical director and consultant psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital told the court that Egan had been admitted to hospital due to mental illness on a number of occasions.

He stopped working as a chef in 1985, at the same time as "his behaviour was beginning to give cause for concern".

His sister died and he began to drink heavily before his life became marked by a "pattern of increasing disorganisation".

He was first admitted to hospital in 1993 following the death of his father, but his psychiatric condition was puzzling and "gave rise to a number of different diagnoses".

Among them were frontal lobe syndrome, schizophrenia, and abnormal personality. He later returned to live in a flat both on his own and with a fellow patient but his behaviour became more troublesome.

He was involved in a number of altercations which drew him to the attention of gardaí, including an altercation with an elderly woman for which he was sentenced to a 18 months in prison. No abnormality was found when he was admitted at that time.

Later, he claimed it was the woman's fault and appeared not to appreciate that others might not believe his account of the incident.

He was released from Mountjoy in August 2004 and was advised not to drink alcohol.

Soon afterwards, he began to have difficulty swallowing and started drooling and in July 2005 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. It was noted at the time that he was "very sensitive" and was easily offended.

On Wednesday night, August 17, 2005, Francis Ralph had gone out to dinner with her husband to celebrate their friends' wedding anniversary.

Her husband Michael Ralph told the court that they went to get a taxi sometime after 12. He said they were slagging their wives because "they were talking so much we had missed a number of taxis".

He was holding his wife's hand and they were first in the queue when someone shouted "run".

They moved out onto the road and they were still holding hands.

"Francis said to me, 'Michael, I think I've been pinched,' and with that she fell to the ground," he said. "There was blood everywhere. It was like a river. It was terrible."

He saw a man with a knife in his right hand and he put it back in his bag before walking away. A number of other people followed him.

"I was hysterical because there was no ambulance coming and she was just lying there. Her eyes were like saucers," he said.

The victim was then taken to the hospital in Naas in a Garda car, where she was pronounced dead shortly after arrival. Mr Ralph broke down in the witness box as he said: "She was gone. She was gone. She was my best friend."

He told prosecuting counsel Mr Brendan Grehan SC that they had never come into with Mr Egan before.

"It came totally out of the blue," he said.

A number of other witnesses told the court that they had seen Mr Egan being removed from the Five Lamps pub earlier on that night after he hit a woman twice on the head.

Josie Thorpe, who was drinking in the pub at the time and who knew Mr Egan because he had lived in her estate, said that another woman who was in the pub had made a gesture to her relating to Mr Egan as if to suggest he was mad.

Mr Egan returned to the pub after being removed, but was again refused entry.

In interviews with Dr Kennedy, Mr Egan said he couldn't sleep he returned home but returned to town with a bag and a kitchen knife he had bought in Tesco a few weeks previously. He said he had nowhere else to put the knife and that it was still in its covering.

He told him he that he walked by Mrs Ralph who began to make faces and rude signs at him.

"My arm went downwards and landed on her shoulder and sank in," he said.

He said that although Mr Egan claimed he wished the incident had never happened, he often smiled in a bland way, and that his replies were frequently lacking in emotional appropriateness. He once said Mrs Ralph "should have walked by like everybody else".

He believed Mr Egan suffered from delusions, including the belief that his sisters fire-balled his uncle's house so as to incriminate him.

Egan also rejected his dribbling could have caused him to be banned from a number of the pubs in town.

He claimed the real cause was because he had told them about a time when he was sexually assaulted by another man in a car.

He said Mr Egan suffered from "a paranoid state, and has pervasive paranoid traits that are present continuously, which are at times persecutory delusions".

He said the brain disease has resulted in a personality and behavioural disorder.

It was Mr Kennedy's opinion that Mr Egan reached two out of the two criteria to warrant the special verdict of "not guilty by way of insanity", namely that he did not fully know what he was doing at the time of the offence and that he was unable to refrain from committing the act at the time.

Egan's brother died of the condition in 2001 and Egan's life expectancy is not expected to exceed a number of years.

He remains estranged from other family members.

A statement on behalf of Mr Ralph said: "For such a good person to have their life cut short in circumstances where the law left so many unanswered questions, there will be no option but to pursue these unanswered questions in order to try and prevent any other family having to go through the extreme sadness that we've experienced and will continue to do so in the future."