A hospital patient who punched a sleeping 88-year-old man to death when they were in the same ward at the Mercy University Hospital (MUH) in Cork has been jailed for 12 years.
Dylan Magee (33) had been found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter of Matthew Healy by reason of diminished responsibility.
Healy, a retired farmer from Berrings, Co Cork, had been described as a “kind, humble gentleman”. He was attacked by Magee on January 22nd, 2023.
The trial jury at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork last December heard Magee, of Churchfield Green in the city, was admitted to MUH on January 19th, 2023. He had been urgently referred there by his GP and was in a hallucinatory state, seeing dead people and hearing voices.
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Magee suffers from addiction issues and was on an anti-depressant medication when he was admitted to hospital.
At about 5.15am on January 22nd, 2023, he became agitated and assaulted Healy, who was asleep in another bed in a hospital ward. Healy had been been in hospital for several days after he fell and hit his head at home.
Magee initially punched Healy between four and six times. Staff attempted to intervene, before Magee struck Healy another three times. Staff then managed to drag him away. Magee was yelling: “This man [Healy] ate my son.”
When interviewed by gardaí, he admitted he had “lost the plot” and started beating Healy. He was of the mistaken belief that the pensioner was a person in his twenties and that he “ate his son”.
Consultant psychiatrists for both the defence and prosecution had agreed in the case that Magee’s ability to refrain from the attack was impaired.
At a sentencing hearing in Cork on Friday, Judge Siobhan Lankford said it was clear Healy was in a “very helpless position and was a vulnerable person” when he was attacked by Magee.
The judge noted Magee’s remorse and his entering of a plea of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility when he went on trial for murder.
She said his lawyer, Brendan Grehan, offered the view that both Healy and his client were let down by the system.
She thanked Claire Healy, a daughter of the deceased, for delivering a “moving victim-impact statement”. The judge offered her condolences to the Healy family following the loss of “a real gentleman” in such awful circumstances.
Lankford said she couldn’t ignore the psychiatric evidence in the case. She noted that case law in similar cases allowed for a reduction of about a third in the sentence.
She jailed Magee for 13 years, suspending the final year of the sentence to facilitate his rehabilitation back into society.
In a victim-impact statement, Claire Healy said her father deserved “to slip away from this world as gently and kindly as the man he was”.
“Words can’t express how traumatising it has been to discover that the attack was carried out by someone who went on a drug binge, suffered delirium from the withdrawal and then pleaded diminished responsibility.”
Healy described the verdict – guilty of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility – as being only suitable for “genuinely ill individuals”.
