A MENTALLY ill Sydney woman accused of stabbing her drinking buddy has been acquitted of murder.
Patricia Anne Gallagher was charged with murdering her friend William (Billy) Grant at his home in Revesby on February 12, 2009, by stabbing him in the stomach with a kitchen knife.
Ms Gallagher was arrested nearly two years after Mr Grant's death following a lengthy undercover police operation which her lawyer claimed was carried out improperly.
She was found unfit to be tried and instead faced a special hearing before a judge alone in the Supreme Court in Sydney earlier this year.
The court heard Ms Gallagher and Mr Grant may have previously been in a sexual relationship and often drank excessively together.
Paramedics called to Mr Grant's home found him sitting on the bathroom floor while Ms Gallagher was in a state of "panic and distress".
When asked who had stabbed him, Ms Gallagher replied, "I don't know. He tried to kill himself before. He's got mental health issues".
Mr Grant, who was still conscious at that point, also said he didn't know who had stabbed him, but he denied self-harming.
"Don't be a bloody idiot," he told paramedics.
"I've survived cancer, why would I try and kill myself?"
He died later in hospital from a stab wound to the stomach.
Ms Gallagher consistently denied she had stabbed Mr Grant but eight months later police began an undercover operation that ended in November 2010 when Ms Gallagher admitted she had stabbed Mr Grant.
She told the undercover officer she had said, "Billy, I don't want to do this. It's going to kill me to do this, but I've had it".
She then demonstrated knifing a person with her hands clasped.
The court heard Ms Gallagher suffered from brain damage, alcohol dependence disorder, dementia and epilepsy.
Her defence barrister, Mark Austin, submitted there had been impropriety on the part of the police in obtaining Ms Gallagher's admissions.
In a judgment published this week, Justice Geoffrey Bellew agreed an undercover operation targeting a mentally ill person was "not something to be encouraged".
But he found police had not acted illegally and he was not satisfied impropriety had been established.
Justice Bellew said Ms Gallagher's admissions should be excluded from the evidence on the grounds of fairness.
He said her admissions of guilt "came against a background of (her) consistently denying that she was responsible for the deceased's murder, and were made in the context of (the undercover operative) in effect pre-empting her denials and repeatedly interrupting her account".
Justice Bellew found that on the evening of Mr Grant's death, there was a period of up to one hour during which he was satisfied Ms Gallagher was in her own home at Padstow.
"The possibility that an unknown person stabbed the deceased within that time, and that the accused later found him bleeding cannot, in my view, be excluded," he said.
He acquitted Ms Gallagher of murder and of the alternative charge of manslaughter.
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