Couple charged over diet death

Press, 6 December 1985, Page 6

Couple charged over diet death

NZPA-AAP < Melbourne A Melbourne couple whose daughter, aged 3, died after being kept on a water diet for 27 days will be tried on charges of manslaughter early next year. Marcus Hamilton Barnes, aged 24, arid Joanne Therese Eaton, aged 26, both of suburban Malvern, were ordered to stand trial in the Supreme Court on February 3 for the death of Rebecca Eaton, who died on May 20. A Coroner, Mr Anthony Ellis, S.M., told the Hawthorn Coroner’s Court that under the circumstances of Rebecca Eaton’s death the test of criminal responsibility was objective. He found that by the conduct of Barnes and Eaton it was reasonably foreseeable that death or harm would have occurred as a result of their actions.

Their actions amounted to manslaughter by criminal

negligence, he said; Negligent ‘ manslaughter did not entail a conscious decision on behalf of an accused He questioned whether the conduct of Barnes and Eaton fell below community stand- ' In his summation of the coronial hearing, Mr Ellis said that the pair had a duty of care and they had failed in their legal responsibility as far as criminal negligence was concerned. , The court had been told Rebecca Eaton was put on a 27-day diet of distilled water by the couple to try to cure her of a cold. Mr Ellis told the Court that the cause of the girl’s death had been established as malnutrition complicated by terminal pneumonia, and described the circumstances surrounding the. death as “unusual and tragic.”