Accused 'may have been misdiagnosed', court hears

Diagnosing the 21 year-old apprentice butcher accused of murdering his sister as suffering from a mental disorder was an attempt to "clutch at straws", the director of the Central Hospital said today.

Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Harry Kennedy told a jury in the Central Criminal Court that the defence psychiatrists’ diagnoses of depersonalisation disorder and temporal lobe epilepsy was an attempt to find an explanation in this "tragic case".