December 18, 2012

Jury trial centres on alcohol syndrome

By David Clarkson

Alcohol idiosyncratic intoxication ? known as AII, according to the experts who are giving evidence ? has gone on trial in the Christchurch District Court.

The syndrome has been raised as a defence in a bizarre assault case which is being heard before Judge Jane Farish and a jury.

The facts of the case are not in dispute at the three-day trial, but psychiatrists will give evidence for both the defence and the Crown about AII.

A 23-year-old Korean man, Young Jae Lee, denies alternative charges of wounding Matthew Rosanowski with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and wounding with intent to injure.

Judge Farish told the jury: ?The contest in relation to this case is whether or not Mr Lee was so intoxicated or suffering from the syndrome to the extent that he was not capable of forming the intent to cause really serious harm to Mr Rosanowski.?

Defence counsel Kim McCoy said that Lee lacked the intent to injure the victim because he ?didn?t have a guilty mind?.

The defence expert witness would give evidence of alcohol idiosyncratic intoxication , he said. ?This is a condition whereby a sufferer who has a relatively small amount of alcohol will have a totally unexpected or idiosyncratic reaction that can be aggressive in nature.?

Crown prosecutor Marcus Zintl said Mr Rosanowski was going out with Lee?s sister. A group had dinner at their home on January 20, 2011, and drank Korean rice wine, soju, which was 19.5 percent alcohol. They then went to a karaoke bar in the city, and had more to drink.

When they came home, Mr Rosanowski put the sister to bed to sleep because she was quite drunk, and then sat on the floor in the bedroom to make sure she was all right.

Rosanowski gave evidence that Lee came into the room and saw him there. He looked angry, and left the room but then returned with a knife, and stabbed him twice in the top of the head, and also caused two wounds to his arms as he protected his head. He was bleeding and in pain and needed stitches at the hospital. He said Lee had stabbed him with ?not that much force?.

Straight after the attack, Lee had apologised to him and cried. He met Lee and his sister over coffee at a shopping mall next day and Lee again apologised. Lee wanted to make amends with compensation.

Lee?s sister, Haram Lee, gave evidence of that meeting, when Lee had kept apologising but said he could not remember what had happened. She did not recall giving a statement to the police that Lee had said he attacked Mr Rosanowski because he was angry about him being at home with his sister.

Psychiatrist Fraser Todd, called by the defence, said Lee appeared to have had at least 7.5 to 8 standard drinks over a period of hours, with food. He appeared to have had an alcohol induced black-out ? a period of memory loss. His response was ?idiosyncratic ? unpredictable and out of character?. This met a diagnosis of alcohol idiosyncratic intoxication or pathological intoxication.

?It?s an unclear diagnosis, with differences of opinion around it,? he said. But it was not a made-up condition. It was first described in the 1860s and there had been numerous case studies.

Asked to sum up the main area of difference between his views and those of forensic psychiatrist Dr Erik Monasterio ? who will give evidence tomorrow ? Dr Todd said: ?Is it AII or not? And what is AII??

He was cross-examined by Mr Zintl about AII being deleted from the American Psychiatric Association manual for making diagnoses, because of concerns about whether it existed.

Mr Zintl noted that Lee had been aware enough to apologise after the attack, and suggested to Dr Todd that his blackout opinion was ?just nonsense?.

The trial continues today.