The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Anton Mulder’s appeal against his conviction for murdering his wife, finding no merit in his challenges to psychiatric evidence at his second trial.
Mulder had pleaded not guilty on 14 January 2008 to murdering his wife by strangulation at their family home in Dunshaughlin, County Meath, on 17 December 2004. A jury convicted him on 25 January 2008 and he received a life sentence. It was his second trial: a conviction at his first trial in May 2006 had been set aside after a brother of the deceased spoke to a juror outside the courtroom.
At the second trial, the defence sought to call psychiatrist Dr Sally Lenihan to give evidence about Mulder’s mental condition at the time of trial. The defence said this would support its evidence that he had been depressed around the time of the offence. The prosecution objected that evidence about his condition at trial could not establish his mental state when the offence occurred.
The trial judge deferred a final decision, saying the evidence would not be admitted unless the defence first laid a proper foundation. After calling two other psychiatrists, the defence made no further application to call Lenihan. The appeal court said the trial judge had not ruled her evidence out altogether. It also considered evidence about Mulder’s condition at trial irrelevant to his state of mind at the time of the offence, particularly as he had been in custody since the offence and imprisonment could itself explain depression.
The defence also challenged evidence from prosecution psychiatrist Dr Paul O’Connell, including his reference to the sentence imposed after the first trial and his description of Mulder as “cunning, deceitful, manipulative and plausible”. The appeal court said custody was relevant to assessing the claimed depression, and the trial judge had offered to give the jury a direction to address the sentence reference. The defence did not take up that offer. The court considered O’Connell’s comments part of his explanation for disagreeing with the defence diagnosis; his opinion had been tested in cross-examination.
The court concluded that the challenged evidence did not make the trial unfair, found the appeal grounds without merit, and dismissed the appeal. It did not reconsider the jury’s murder verdict or alter the life sentence.