Regina v John Charles Maxwell

THE SUPREME COURT OF NEW SOUTH WALES CRIMINAL DIVISION

1 HIS HONOUR: The accused, John Charles Maxwell, stands charged with the murder of Mervyn James Alchin at Wagga on 25 March 1998. He has been tried by me sitting without a jury. There is no issue that he killed the deceased. The only matter to be determined is whether he was mentally ill, as the law understands that expression, at the time of the killing. 2 The accused is now twenty-five years old and was twenty-three at the relevant time. He is a single man. He had been living with his mother at Darlington Point. In early 1998 he moved to Wagga and took up residence with a lifelong friend, Brendan Carter. He was an accomplished footballer and he began playing with a local football club at Wagga. It was in that context that he met the deceased, Mr Alchin, who was a man of about fifty years of age who was described as a strapper at that club. 3 On 20 March 1998 the accused had an argument with Mr Carter about his, that is the accused's, standard of tidiness in the house. The accused left and moved in with the deceased. It was there in the early afternoon of 25 March that he killed the deceased. He attacked him with a knife, inflicting a large number of wounds. To recount the details of the incident and of the deceased's injuries would be needlessly distressing. It is sufficient to say that it was a sustained and ferocious attack. From the injuries and from the accused's own account of the event I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that he intended to kill the deceased. His counsel, Mr John Nicholson SC has not suggested otherwise. Accordingly, the elements of the crime of murder are made out. 4 To understand the circumstances it is necessary to examine the accused's psychiatric state. On this aspect I have the benefit of expert evidence from two experienced and respected forensic psychiatrists, Dr Olav Nielssen and Dr C L Wong. 5 Dr Nielssen, in his capacity as a visiting psychiatrist with the Corrections Health Service, treated the accused for a considerable period of time from 1 April 1998, only a matter of days after the killing. The history he obtained from the accused was to the effect that about eighteen months prior to the killing he began to experience auditory hallucinations. These were benign at first but increased in intensity. He began to attend church and to read the Bible and he formed the idea that passages in the Bible related to him. Indeed, he came to believe that he was the Son of God. 6 More significantly, the voices became demonic. He believed that he heard the voices of demons who wanted to kill him because he was the Son of God. He believed that they had great powers and came to believe that he was in acute and immediate danger of being killed. 7 He had been popular and had many friends but as the illness developed he began to withdraw from social contact, and became distrustful even of good friends. Dr Nielssen also obtained from the accused a history of his use of alcohol and drugs but I do not consider that to be material for the purpose of my decision today. 8 There is some confirmation of this history in the other evidence in the case. In a statement to police the accused's mother, Mrs Brenda Maxwell, spoke of a deterioration of his mental condition over the period of months leading to the killing. She recalled his hallucination of a demonic figure in the fire of the home. He spoke of seeing demons in his bedroom. She confirmed his interest in religion and the Bible, which she said he had never had before, and her account of that interest suggests it to have been obsessional. On one occasion he claimed to her to be Jesus. His mother spoke of other bizarre behaviour which it is unnecessary to recount. 9 She became sufficiently concerned to ask him to seek treatment. Indeed, it seems that on her behalf an arrangement was made for the accused to see a local medical practitioner, Dr Robert Byrne, but he did not attend for that appointment and he refused to seek any treatment. One can only wonder if the deceased might well be alive if he had not refused. 10 Similar observations of the accused to those of his mother were made by his friend, Brendan Carter and another lifelong friend, Rohan King. Both of them spoke particularly of his religious obsession and his withdrawal from normal social contact. 11 I also received in evidence in the defence case the statement of Mr Geoffrey Foster, a former police officer, who knew the accused through his interest in rugby league. Mr Foster is himself a religious man. He said that the accused had never been religious and spoke of his new involvement in the Bible as "unguided and misinterpreted". It is clear that Mr Foster had held the accused in very high regard as a person and sportsman, but he described his behaviour in the period leading to the killing as spiralling downwards. 12 On the night before the killing, 24 March, Brendan Carter visited the accused at the deceased's home, having heard that he was unwell. The accused told Mr Carter that he had been having really bad headaches. Mr Carter visited him again, twice on the day of the killing. On the second occasion, in the early afternoon, the accused came to the door holding a knife. He was pale. He told Mr Carter not to come in and said that he was "freaking out". Mr Carter asked if he was all right but the accused slammed the door. Mr Carter could hear him mumbling in the house but could not decipher what he was saying. 13 Tragically, the deceased came home from work early that day because he was feeling sick. It was when he arrived at the home in the early afternoon that he met his death. What happened is encapsulated in the history which the accused gave Dr Nielssen and I quote from pp 2 and 3 of Dr Nielssen's report, exhibit 2: He said that Mr Alchin came home soon after Mr Carter left, and went to the toilet in the laundry before coming into the house. Mr Maxwell said he believed Mr Alchin's delay in coming into the house arose from preparations to kill him, and caused him to arm himself with a knife and stab Mr Alchin to death when he came into the house. 14 I pass over the next sentence and the beginning of the one after it and, starting in mid-sentence, the doctor continued: …the immediate reason for attacking Mr Alchin was that the voices told him that Mr Alchin planned to kill him. He said that after stabbing Mr Alchin he took his car and attempted suicide by crashing it into a tree. However, he said the car spun into a paddock and he escaped uninjured and was treated at the roadside before his arrest, where he again heard voices urging him to kill the people attending him. 15 His mother said in her statement that in the late morning of that day the accused phoned her and said that he was "stressing out". It appeared to her from the telephone conversation that he was then hearing voices. 16 The accused made full admissions to police of what he had done. In an electronically recorded interview in answer to question 62 he said that when he drove at the tree he wanted to kill himself, rather than someone else, but that he missed the tree. 17 Mrs Mavis Menz saw this course of driving, which by her description was quite erratic, and she saw the car veer on to the paddock where it came to rest. She went to the accused's assistance. She said that the accused looked vacant and did not appear to understand her when she spoke to him. He spoke of wanting to go to "Joyland". The accused told an ambulance officer who attended the scene, Mr Colin Apps, that he meant to hit the tree and he admitted to Mr Apps that he had killed a man. 18 At the hospital to Det Senior Const Burns the accused said, "I have killed him. I am in hell now." To Det Inspector Bernasconi at the hospital he said: "I'm fucked man. The devil made me do it. I killed the cunt and I will kill someone else. No reason, just the devil." 19 In the course of the recorded interview with police the accused's description of events revealed the same delusional pattern which he had described to Dr Nielssen. Indeed, in answer to a series of questions commencing at question 203, he said that from the previous day he had been scared to leave the house because the voices told him he was to be killed. In answer to question 80, he said that he did not know why he killed the deceased, he was just "a pawn". 20 For the most part during that interview his answers were responsive to questions but some answers were unresponsive and bizarre, consistent with his religious fantasy, and his answer to one of the questions, question 138, suggests that he was hearing voices in the course of the interview itself. 21 He later took part in what is known as a walk through of the scene which was video taped and that video was shown in court yesterday. 22 When Dr Nielssen first saw him in custody, only days after the offence, he described him as floridly psychotic. He said his condition improved only after what he described as enforced medication. 23 In the video of the walk through interview the doctor saw, as he described in evidence, clear signs of mental illness, although he noted that the accused's demeanour was much more subdued than it had been when he saw him in prison. He saw this as explained by the fact that during that walk through the accused was accompanied by a number of police officers and was responding to questions asked of him. 24 Let me turn then to the law relating to the defence of mental illness. The Crown having proved the elements of murder beyond reasonable doubt, the burden of proof shifts to the accused to satisfy me on the balance of probability that he was mentally ill at the relevant time. 25 The leading legal authority on mental illness is still the reported summing up of the former Chief Justice of Australia, Sir Owen Dixon, in R v Porter, a trial which took place in 1933 but the summing-up of which was reported some years later in 55 CLR 182. In some ways, Sir Owen Dixon's language is the language of the thirties but what his Honour said remains as true today as it was then. Speaking of the rationale of the defence of mental illness, his Honour said this at p186: The purpose of the law in punishing people is to prevent others from committing a like crime or crimes. Its prime purpose is to deter people from committing offences. It may be that there is an element of retribution in the criminal law so that when people have committed offences the law considers that they merit punishment, but its prime purpose is to preserve society from the depredations of dangerous and vicious people. Now, it is perfectly useless for the law to attempt, by threatening punishment, to deter people from committing crimes if their mental condition is such that they cannot be in the least influenced by the possibility or probability of subsequent punishment; if they cannot understand what they are doing or cannot understand the ground upon which the law proceeds. The law is not directed, as medical science is, to curing mental infirmities. 26 At p188 his Honour gave the time honoured definition of the defence of mental illness in law: there must be a state of disease or disorder or mental disturbance arising from some infirmity, temporary or of long standing. It must be of such a character as to prevent the accused from knowing the physical nature of the act he was doing or from knowing that what he was doing was wrong. It is the second leg of that twofold definition that is relied on here. It is not suggested that the accused was unaware that he was stabbing a man, and doing so fatally, but it is urged that his mental illness was such that he was prevented from knowing that what he was doing was wrong. 27 Sir Owen Dixon expanded upon that concept a little later in the summing up at pp189-190. His Honour said this: If through the disordered condition of the mind he (that is, the accused) could not reason about the matter with a moderate degree of sense and composure it may be said that he could not know that what he was doing was wrong. What is meant by "wrong"? What is meant by wrong is wrong having regard to the everyday standards of reasonable people. 28 I have the evidence of two eminent forensic psychiatrists whose opinions are that the defence is made out. Properly and responsibly, the Crown Prosecutor has not submitted to the contrary, although she has taken that stance only after a careful consideration of the evidence and a brief but searching cross-examination of Dr Nielssen yesterday. Nevertheless, the decision remains one for me, assisted as I am by the stance taken by counsel, and I must examine the psychiatric opinions in the light of the whole of the evidence. 29 Before I turn to the psychiatric evidence what I can say is this, the other evidence establishes that the accused was only recently acquainted with the deceased. There is no suggestion of any animosity between them. Nothing in the evidence points to any rational motive for the accused having attacked the deceased particularly with such savagery. 30 I gather from the evidence that the accused has no prior convictions and that he was normally not an aggressive person. I have referred already to the statement of Mr Geoffrey Foster, the former police officer, that he was a young man of impeccable character. The observations of his mother and of the other witnesses to whom I have referred makes it clear that his mental condition was deteriorating seriously in the period leading to the killing. All these matters lend force to the conclusions of the psychiatrists. 31 Both psychiatrists diagnose schizophrenia, a very serious mental illness. In evidence yesterday Dr Nielssen recited, from the history of the accused's behaviour in the months leading up to the killing, the classic symptoms of that terrible disease. Dr Nielssen's conclusion was this, and I read from pp5-6 of the report: Mr Maxwell is a twenty-four year old man who killed a man he had only recently met as a result of symptoms arising from an acute episode of psychotic illness. The psychosis was characterised by eighteen months escalation of full syndrome of schizophreniform symptoms, including delusions of reference, thought broadcasting and vivid, frightening auditory hallucinations. Mr Maxwell had never previously been treated for mental illness or had any alternative explanation for his symptoms presented to him and believed at the time of the offence that the victim planned to kill him. There was no provocation or any kind of rational basis for wanting to harm Mr Alchin. The corroborative statements confirm that Mr Maxwell underwent a morbid change in the months before the offence, characterised by withdrawal from company and a preoccupation with religious themes. 32 I pass over the next sentence and continue: He had no history of any kind of criminal conviction and although he was a semi-professional footballer, according to the statements provided he was not known as an aggressive or violent person. I believe Mr Maxwell has the mental illness defence open to him as he had a defect of reason, that is a belief that the victim was planning to kill him owing to a disease of the mind, that is acute schizophrenia. Mr Maxwell probably knew the nature and quality of his act as the voices told him to kill the victim and other people. However, he was not aware that the act was morally wrong as he believed that the world was populated by demons with superhuman powers who planned to kill him because he was the son of God. Moreover, the effects of an acute psychotic episode of the type observed in Mr Maxwell made it impossible for him to reason with a moderate degree of calmness. 33 Dr Nielssen in oral evidence encapsulated his opinion by saying that the accused was acting in a kind of self-defence because of his delusional beliefs. 34 Dr Wong in his report, part of exhibit A, expressed his opinion in this way and I read from pp4-5 of his report: There is no doubt that the accused was suffering from acute symptoms of Schizophrenia at the time of the alleged killing and for about one and a half years prior to that. These consisted predominantly of delusions, largely of a persecutory nature, and auditory hallucinations. 35 I pass over a number of sentences and continue: The symptoms he manifested are highly characteristic of the illness. The account he gave me is in keeping with the observations by his mother and his friend Brendan. It is also consistent with the account he gave to the police at the record of interview. I have no reason to believe that the accounts he gave were anything but genuine. The accused was aware of what he was doing and that what he was doing was wrong at the time of the alleged killing. However, being consumed with his delusional beliefs and hallucinations and in the grip of intense fear engendered by his abnormal experiences, it could not be said that he was able to reason about the rightness and wrongness of his alleged act with any degree of sense and composure. I am therefore of the opinion that he can avail himself of the defence of mental illness. 36 After examining all the evidence, and giving appropriate weight to the opinions of the two experts, I am satisfied that the defence of mental illness has been made out to the requisite standard. Indeed, in my view, no other view could possibly be taken of the evidence. In arriving at that conclusion I have regard to the consequences of the special verdict of not guilty by reason of mental illness, as I am required to do by s37 of the Mental Health (Criminal Procedure) Act 1990. Dr Nielssen gave evidence of those consequences yesterday. 37 My verdict is that the accused is not guilty by reason of mental illness. 38 I turn now to the order which I must make. In the light of my verdict, I order that the accused be detained at the Long Bay Prison Hospital or at such other place as may from time to time be determined by the Minister for Health until released by due process of law. 39 The Court extends its deepest sympathy to all those affected by the loss of the deceased.

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