British double killer appeals guilty verdict
HONG KONG: A British banker, jailed for life for the horrifying murder of two Indonesian women at his upscale Hong Kong apartment in a cocaine-fuelled rampage, has appealed against his conviction.
Cambridge University graduate Rurik Jutting tortured Sumarti Ningsih for three days, filming parts of her ordeal on his phone, before slashing her throat with a serrated knife and stuffing her body into a suitcase.
Days later and with Ningsih’s corpse on his balcony, the former Bank of America worker picked up Seneng Mujiasih, intending to play out the same fantasies. He killed her when she started screaming.
Jutting, now 32, had pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but was found guilty of murder, with the judge at the time describing the killings as “sickening in the extreme”.
But Jutting’s defence team argued yesterday that Judge Michael StuartMoore had repeatedly given wrong directions to the jury during the trial last year when explaining how they should determine whether his state of mind had impaired his responsibility for his actions.
Defence lawyer Gerard McCoy argued that the judge had wrongly told the jury to look for mental “disorders” rather than the broader spectrum of “abnormality of the mind”.
“Abnormality of mind need not be a disorder,” McCoy told the court yesterday.
“The judge has wrongly and prescriptively directed the jury to look for disorders because disorders are what is an abnormality of mind.”
The defence team had argued during the trial that Jutting’s mental responsibility had been substantially affected by heavy alcohol and cocaine use, as well as sexual sadism and narcissistic personality disorder.
Not all four medical experts who testified agreed that Jutting’s behaviour met the criteria for a “disor-
der” in all four areas, said McCoy.
But they did all find that Jutting was suffering from an abnormality of mind as he had impaired mental functioning, he added.
“The ground of appeal is the judge wrongly directed the jury as to the true meaning of abnormality of the mind,” McCoy argued.
“All four experts agreed that there were four concurrent abnormalities of the mind. That’s what the jury should have been asked: Did those four functionings constitute an abnormality of the mind?”
At the end of the trial last year, Stuart-Moore said Jutting had known what he was doing and described him as an “archetypal sexual predator” who presented an extreme danger to women. — AFP