Pardon sought for convicted murderess

Press, 16 August 1984, Page 4

Pardon sought for convicted murderess

NZPA-AAP Sydney The inquiry into the case of the twice-convicted murderess, Lorraine May Price, has ended with a call for her to be pardoned. Mrs Price “is hot asking for mercy, she is asking for justice,” said her counsel, Mr Bill Hosking, Q.C., in summation. The inquiry, headed by Mr Justice Slattery, has investigated Mrs Price’s conviction for the murder of her husband, Harold Price, aged 37, at their farmhouse near. Peak Hill in central western New South Wales on April 2, 1980. Mrs Price, aged 39, the , mother of three children, is serving a life sentence in Mulawa Women’s Prison, Sydney.

She was first convicted in

1981 and successfully appealed, but was convicted again at a second trial last year.

A few weeks before she was resentenced, she took a so-called “truth drug,” sodium penathol, and named a person whom she alleges killed her husband by accident.

Mrs Price has told the inquiry she did not name the alleged killer earlier because she wanted to protect him.

Mr Hosking said that Mrs Price had told several persons in confidence about the alleged killer before she took the truth

drug. However, the consultant psychiatrist who had administered the drug, Dr Oscar Schmalzbach, had been the first person in authority to be told the name.

Because of this, sodium penathol “was the vehicle which unlocked the door to the truth.”

Mr Hosking said that Mrs Price had been “stupid and foolish” not have told the

truth from the outset. If she had done so “no court in the land would have convicted her.”

He said the Price family had been one that could have been “tom asunder only by accident.”

“Mrs Price is a woman incapable of killing,” Mr Hosking said. She had loved her husband even though her marriage was a “failure in bed.”

Mrs Price blamed herself and not her husband.

“On the day of the shooting, she was knitting her husband a cardigan,” Mr Hosking said. “This was hardly a prelude to murder.”

Mr Justice Slattery is expected to submit his report to the New South Wales Governor, Sir James Rowland, within the next few weeks.

His Honour has asked that the alleged killer not be identified.