Nurses did not have intent necessary for murder, court hears

The barrister for a nurse who killed her mother on Christmas Eve has said she did not have the intent necessary for murder because she was so intoxicated.

Caroline Biggs SC was giving her closing speech in the trial of a 36-year-old nurse charged with murdering her mother in their Dublin home on December 24th, 2010.

Greta Dudko of Station Court Hall, Clonsilla has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of 55-year-old Anna Butautiene. However, the Lithuanian mother of one has pleaded not guilty to her murder.

The Central Criminal Court heard the accused, her mother and Ms Dudko's toddler had left the home they shared with Ms Dudko's husband just weeks before the killing. Ms Dudko told detectives that her mother had described her so- in-law as a beast and encouraged her to leave him.

The trial also heard that the accused had developed an alcohol problem, was on a number of medications and had been suspended from her job at the start of the month due to intoxication at work.

Vitalij Dudko testified that he took their three-year-old son to his home on the evening of Christmas Eve. He had found his wife drunk and asleep when he went to collect them for dinner and she agreed to let him take the child.

Ms Dudko told detectives that she had a row with her mother when Ms Butautiene arrived home an hour later to find her grandson gone.

She said that her mother had hit her and pulled her by her hair from one bedroom to another. She said she banged her mother’s head off a wall before hitting her over her head with a glass bottle.

A postmortem exam found that Ms Butautiene died of blunt force trauma to the head.

Ms Biggs has asked the jury to consider the partial defence of lack of intent, which can reduce murder to manslaughter. In this case, she said, the lack of intent was due to intoxication.

“Could the high level of intoxicants have put her in a position where she couldn’t have formed the intent?” he asked.

She pointed to the possible ‘paradoxical effect’ of the various medicines she was taking, the effects of which were increased with alcohol.

If the jury rejected this argument, she asked it to consider another partial defence, provocation, which can also reduce murder to manslaughter.

She quoted her client’s answers to gardaí during questioning, when she said she didn’t know where the force had come from, that it was spontaneous, happened in seconds and that she wasn’t thinking.

“We ask you to bring in a verdict of manslaughter,” she said.

Mr Justice Paul Carney has now begun charging the jury of seven men and five women, who are expected to begin deliberating this afternoon.