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Key events
What the jury heard on Wednesday
Here’s what the jury heard yesterday:
PATTERSON’S defence lawyer, COLIN MANDY SC, said his client was “not on trial for being a liar”. He told jurors that the court was not one of “moral judgment”.
The prosecution’s case that Patterson wanted her estranged husband, SIMON, to attend the lunch so she could kill him was “absurd”, Mandy said.
The defence said that the jury should reject the evidence from the sole surviving lunch guest, IAN WILKINSON, that Patterson served her guests on four large grey plates while eating from an orangey-tan coloured plate. Mandy said Ian was “honestly mistaken”.
Mandy said that the December 2022 Facebook group chat messages, where Patterson said her in-laws were a “lost cause”, were being used by the prosecution as a distraction from the evidence in the case. He said the messages, which related to a disagreement over child support with SIMON, stood out because they were about the only disagreement between Patterson and her in-laws.
MANDY says online searches about death cap mushrooms – discovered on a computer police seized from PATTERSON’S house – showed his client’s “idle curiosity” and that she was not a person “carefully studying this information”.
