The Court of Appeal has dismissed Renato Gehlen’s appeal against his murder conviction, ruling that the trial judge was right not to leave the partial defence of provocation to the jury.
The appeal concerned only whether the jury should have been allowed to consider provocation as a defence that could reduce murder to manslaughter. The court did not retry the case. It concluded that the evidence did not meet the legal threshold for putting that defence to the jury.
Gehlen was convicted of murdering his wife, Anne Colomines, who died from stabbing injuries on 24 October 2017. The judgment records that she had produced a knife and threatened to harm herself during an interaction lasting less than ten minutes. The couple’s marriage had broken down, and she was planning to leave him.
At trial, Gehlen’s defence was that the injuries were accidental or self-inflicted. He also asked the judge to leave provocation to the jury, relying on Colomines producing a knife in the bedroom. He did not rely on the marriage breakdown or suspected infidelity as provocation. The trial judge refused the application, finding no evidence from which a jury could reasonably conclude that Gehlen had lost self-control and intentionally inflicted fatal injuries in response to a provocative act.
On appeal, Gehlen argued that the judge had placed too much weight on his interview accounts, in which he denied inflicting the injuries. The Court of Appeal accepted that an accused need not expressly describe being provoked in an interview or testimony: the necessary evidence can emerge from the circumstances as a whole. But it said Gehlen’s detailed account positively conflicted with the claim that he intentionally killed in a loss of self-control, and the court could not build an imagined scenario that was unsupported by the evidence.
The court said producing a knife is not, by itself, necessarily provocative; context matters. In the account Gehlen gave in interview, Colomines first produced the knife while threatening self-harm. The court held that this could not constitute provocation against another person. Later, she reportedly said something about damaging or “fucking up” Gehlen. The interpreter had difficulty capturing her words, and the judgment said there was no evidence that Gehlen understood them as a threat of violence with the knife.
The court also found no evidence that Gehlen lost self-control in response to the knife. It noted the evidence that he had been distressed about the relationship and had earlier texted his friend the word “stab” in that context, but said the evidence as a whole did not support the defence. It dismissed the appeal.