A 32-year-old man who stabbed his parents and younger brother to death at their Co Louth home has been found not guilty of their murders but guilty of manslaughter by diminished responsibility by the unanimous verdicts of a Central Criminal Court jury.<\/p>\n
The panel accepted the evidence given by two psychiatrists that Robert O\u2019Connor was suffering from a relapse of schizophrenia when he killed the three members of his family and that the partial defence of guilty of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility under section 6 of the Criminal Law Insanity Act 2006 would be an appropriate verdict.<\/p>\n
The State had submitted in its closing speech that verdicts of guilty of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility were more in accordance with the preponderance of the evidence in the case and also reflected the harmony of both psychiatrists.<\/p>\n
Lawyers for O\u2019Connor had asked the jurors to consider finding him not guilty by reason of insanity so that he could get the \u201cproper mental health treatment\u201d he needed and \u201cnot be misdiagnosed for a fourth time\u201d.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Connor (32), of Drumgowna, Louth village, Dundalk, Co Louth, had pleaded not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, or guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility to the triple murder of his mother Louise (56), his father Mark (54) and his brother Evan (27) at their home between September 28th and 29th, 2025, both dates inclusive.<\/p>\n
The Central Criminal Court jury was told the defendant accepted he caused the death of the three victims, who had sustained a combined 139 stab wounds.<\/p>\n
Robert O\u2019Connor had told garda\u00ed he stabbed his autistic brother Evan like a \u201cblood bag\u201d and later described in his interviews how his mother had asked him to let his younger brother go as he held them by knife point in their sittingroom. <\/p>\n
A pathologist testified that the majority of Evan O\u2019Connor\u2019s wounds were inflicted by his eldest brother while he was still alive.<\/p>\n
Robert O\u2019Connor, who was not maintaining his schizophrenia medication and using cocaine in the months before the three killings, told officers that he had a row with his parents over drugs, lost his head and only meant to kill his father and brother, but not his mother.<\/p>\n
The jury of six men and six women spent four hours and eight minutes deliberating over two days before bringing in unanimous verdicts on each of the three counts.<\/p>\n
The panel had been told by prosecuting barrister Roisin Lacey in her opening speech that the \u201cbattleground\u201d between the prosecution and defence in the trial was whether O\u2019Connor was insane at the time.<\/p>\n
While both expert psychiatric witnesses were of the view that guilty verdicts of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility under section 6 of the Criminal Law Insanity Act 2006 would be appropriate, they differed on whether the defendant qualified for a special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity under section 5 of the Act.<\/p>\n
Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Fiona Toal, called to give evidence by the defence, testified that O\u2019Connor did not know what he was doing was wrong and could not refrain from committing the act. She found that he met the criteria for the special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.<\/p>\n
However, psychiatrist Dr Ronan Mullaney, for the prosecution, told the trial that O\u2019Connor met the criteria for the verdict of guilty of manslaughter by diminished responsibility and did not meet the criteria for the special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.<\/p>\n
Mullaney found the defendant had expressed remorse and his question to garda\u00ed about \u201cwhat kind of time\u201d he might expect indicated \u201ca good understanding of his role\u201d.<\/p>\n
The three criteria for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity under the Criminal Law Insanity Act 2006 are that the defendant did not know the nature and quality of the act, or was unable to appreciate that what they did at the time was wrong or would have been unable to refrain from their actions.<\/p>\n
In his charge to the panel following the three-week trial at the Central Criminal Court, Judge M\u00edche\u00e1l P O\u2019Higgins said the psychiatric evidence in the case reduced the choice the panel had to one of two verdicts: not guilty by reason of insanity or guilty of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.<\/p>\n
The judge said that if the panel was not satisfied on the balance of probabilities that O\u2019Connor was legally insane at the time of the killings, it was only then that they would go on to consider the alternative verdict of diminished responsibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 32-year-old man who stabbed his parents and younger brother to death at their Co Louth home has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[42851,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-674998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-central-criminal-court","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}