The High Court trial of a woman accused of killing her three daughters at their Timaru home is underway in Christchurch.<\/p>\n
Lauren Anne Dickason is charged with murdering her 2-year-old twin daughters Karla and Maya, and their older sister Lian\u00e9, who was 6, on 16 September 2021.<\/p>\n
Her husband Graham, an orthopaedic surgeon, found them dead when he arrived home about 10pm after dining with colleagues at a restaurant.<\/p>\n
The family had moved into a property in Timaru’s Queen Street only a week earlier, having arrived in New Zealand from South Africa a month before.<\/p>\n
Dickason has plead not guilty to the killings, with the defence to argue insanity and infanticide.<\/p>\n
Dozens of witnesses will give evidence during the three-week trial in front of Justice Cameron Mander.<\/p>\n
Empanelling of the twelve person jury began in court on Monday.<\/p>\n
Opening statements from Crown prosecutor Andrew McRae and Dickason’s defence lawyer Kerryn Beaton KC are expected to follow later in the day.<\/p>\n
With her signed consent, Dickason’s lawyer entered pleas of not guilty to all three murder charges in October 2021.<\/p>\n
Beaton confirmed her client was to rely on an insanity and infanticide defence.<\/p>\n
Under New Zealand law, infanticide functions as both a stand-alone offence, and as a partial defence to murder or manslaughter.<\/p>\n
Graham Dickason was expected to be called to give evidence in the trial from Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The Crown was applying for him to give evidence from South Africa via audiovisual link, but this was opposed by the defence.<\/p>\n
Suppression orders remain in place on the details of the alleged crime.<\/p>\n
Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The High Court trial of a woman accused of killing her three daughters at their Timaru home is underway in Christchurch. Lauren Anne Dickason is charged with murdering her 2-year-old twin daughters Karla and Maya, and their older sister Lian\u00e9, who was 6, on 16 September 2021. Her husband Graham, an orthopaedic surgeon, found them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6481,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479\/revisions\/6481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}