Man pleads insanity after 'brutal, maniacal attack’

Press, 29 June 1983, Page 4

Man pleads insanity after 'brutal, maniacal attack’

PA Palmerston North A woman attacked in Palmerston North last August was so badly beaten her face looked “like a piece of raw meat,” the High Court in Palmerston North heard. Lawrence John Moana Clark, aged 26, unemployed, of Palmerston North, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of assaulting Colleen Ann Rapana, of Otaki, with intent to cause grievous bodily harm on August 12. The trial is before Mr Justice Ongley and a jury. A pyschiatrist gave evidence in Clark’s defence, saying that he considered the accused was insane and would probably never recover. The Crown prosecutor, Mr D. C. McKegg, described the assault on Miss Rapana as a “brutal, at-

Miss Rapana told the Court she had been drinking with friends at a city hotel, had met Clark, and accompanied him to his sister’s home. Later she asked Clark to walk her to a telephone so she could ring a taxi, and on the way to a telephone Clark turned on her. Before the attack Clark had seemed quite normal and calm, she said. “Then I was lying on the concrete steps and he was banging my head against the concrete.” Miss Rapana said she tried to get up and run away, but she collapsed. There was blood all. over her and Clark ripped off most of her clothes. She began to lose her vision and passed out. “I have lost my left eye

completely and 25 per cent of the vision in my right eye,” she said. She heeded 14 stitches on the back of her head. A security guard, Mr Keith Hutton, found Miss Rapana lying semi-con-scious at 1.40 a.m. “She was a mess. The only way I can describe her face was that it looked like a piece of raw meat that had been chewed up and regurgitated by an animal.” For Clark, Mr L. H. Atkins said the only explanation for his client’s unexpected and seemingly motiveless and unplanned attack was that he was insane. He said a person should not be committed on a charge if he had been labouring under a disease of the mind and was incapable of rjvsoning that his acts

were morally wrong. He called Professor Reginald Warren Medlicott to prove the defence of insanity. Professor Medlicott, a psychiatrist, said Clark had below-normal intelligence, severe peronality disorders, and schizophrenia. It was “extraordinarily unlikely” that Clark would recover from his mental illness and would continue to need institutional care, he said. In Professor Medlicott’s opinion, Clark had never been able to cope as an independent human being. Clark was on the borderline of intellectual handicap, his personality growth had been grossly abnormal and this had been complicated by schizophrenia. He also experienced hallucinations and sadistic fantasies. Proceeding.