‘Cannibal’ who slit woman’s throat on street loses appeal
Insanity defence for random stabbing is dismissed
A WOMAN who claimed to have cannibalistic urges yesterday failed to have her conviction overturned for the attempted murder of a civil servant whose throat she slit in an unprovoked random attack.
Laura Kenna, 37, repeatedly stabbed Fionnuala Bourke who was walking home f rom work on the Lower Drumcondra Road in Dublin on January 3, 2017.
She believed she had killed the woman, later telling gardaí she ‘sliced her like you would a goat’.
After she was arrested, Kenna, who was homeless, said she had wanted to kill someone and had intended eating her victim.
The Court of Appeal yesterday dismissed the appeal by Kenna against her convictions for the attempted murder and assault causing harm of Ms Bourke.
The court also threw out a separate appeal by Kenna against the severity of the sentence imposed on her by the Central Criminal Court in April 2019 following a jury trial.
The ruling means Kenna, of no fixed abode, must serve the tenyear jail sentence handed down by the Central Criminal Court after Judge Tara Burns imposed a 15-year prison term but suspended the final five years.
Kenna, who was subsequently diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity for her attack on Ms Bourke, who was repeatedly stabbed and had her t hroat cut by Kenna who demanded her victim’s handbag before fleeing to Maynooth.
Counsel for Kenna, Barry White SC, had claimed the convictions were unsafe on the basis the evidence given by the prosecution’s main expert witness, Professor Harry Kennedy, the executive clinical director of the Central Mental Hospital, that she was not legally insane at the time of the i ncident was f undamentally flawed, inadequate and contradicted by other evidence.
The court heard Kenna was found not guilty by reason of insanity for another assault which had occurred two weeks before the attack on Ms Bourke when she tried to stab a woman in the eye with a pen at a Luas stop.
Dismissing the appeal, Court of Appeal president Judge George Birmingham, presiding with two other judges, said the jury had faced an unenviable task given the conflicting opinions of two eminent consultant psychiatrists. He added: ‘While undoubtedly there was material which might have resulted in the jury returning a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, equally there was material supported by credible expert testimony which provided a basis for returning a verdict of guilty.’
He said it was not for the appeal court to second-guess the decision reached by the jury and given the severity of the attack, Judge Burns made no error in principle as the headline sentence could not have been less than 17 years.
‘Sliced her like you would a goat’