MORWELL, Australia: An Australian woman promised a “special meal” for her in-laws before dishing up a beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms that killed three of them, jurors heard Wednesday.
On the opening day of a trial that has drawn global attention, Erin Patterson, 50, faced a jury accused of three murders – including her parents-in-law – and one attempted murder.
She has pleaded not guilty to all counts, with her defense saying it was all “a terrible accident.”
Patterson “deliberately poisoned” her guests, Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers told the jury.
The accused served “individual beef Wellingtons, mashed potatoes and green beans,” with the guests eating from four large grey dinner plates, while she ate from a smaller, orange plate, Rogers said.
Patterson invited her guests to the lunch in late July 2023 at her home in the sedate Victoria state farm village of Leongatha, telling them she had a health issue to relate, the prosecutor said.
Her estranged husband Simon Patterson declined, texting her the night before that he felt “uncomfortable” going.
In a return text minutes later, Patterson said she was “disappointed,” as she wanted to prepare a “special meal and that she may not be able to have a lunch like this for some time,” Rogers said.
But her husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, decided to go, along with his aunt Heather Wilkinson and her husband, local pastor Ian Wilkinson.
During the lunch, Patterson claimed to have cancer and wanted their advice about how to tell her two children, the prosecutor said.
Medical tests later found no evidence she had cancer, Rogers said.
Within hours of the lunch, the four guests developed diarrhea and vomiting, and were raced to hospital.
All were diagnosed by treating doctors with poisoning by death cap mushrooms, Rogers told the court.
Within days, Don, Gail and Heather were dead.
Ian, the pastor, survived after nearly two months in hospital.
Patterson went to the hospital two days after the lunch and complained she, too, was unwell, the prosecution said.
She initially refused medical assistance and left the hospital, but relented and returned for treatment, the court heard.
Patterson said her children had eaten leftovers of the beef Wellington.
But she claimed to have scraped off the mushroom paste and pastry because they were “fussy,” Rogers said.
When medical staff demanded to see her children, Patterson resisted saying she did not want them to “be panicked and stressed.”
“She did not appear to be concerned about children’s health but rather about stressing them out,” Rogers said.
The children eventually received medical attention but did not have any symptoms of poisoning.
Rogers said Patterson knew that neither she nor her children had consumed the deadly mushrooms.
Police located beef Wellington remnants at Patterson’s home, which were found under forensic investigation to have traces of death cap mushrooms, Rogers added.
Patterson allegedly told doctors she used fresh mushrooms from a supermarket and also dried mushrooms from an Asian grocery – but she did not remember which one.
A Department of Health investigation was unable to trace any shop selling death cap mushrooms.
Patterson discarded a food dehydrator in the days after the lunch, which was later found to contain traces of death cap mushrooms, prosecutors said.
Patterson’s lawyer Colin Mandy said the poisoning was a “tragedy and terrible accident.”
“She didn’t do it deliberately, she didn’t do it intentionally. The defense case is that she didn’t intend to cause anyone any harm on that day,” he said.
Patterson is being tried in the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell, south of Melbourne.
The trial is expected to last about six weeks.
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Australian triple-murder suspect allegedly cooked ‘special’ mushroom meal
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https://arab.news/pd9r7
Australian triple-murder suspect allegedly cooked ‘special’ mushroom meal
- ‘Special meal’ for her in-laws was Beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms
- Within hours of the lunch, the four guests developed diarrhea and vomiting
Trump’s new tariffs shift focus to balance of payments; economists see no crisis
President Donald Trump’s temporary 15 percent tariffs to replace those struck down by the US Supreme Court are meant to resolve a problem that many economists say does not exist: a US balance of payments crisis, making them potentially vulnerable to new legal challenges.
Hours after the high court on Friday struck down a huge swath of tariffs Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president announced the new duties under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a never-used statute that even his own legal team dismissed as irrelevant months ago.
Collections of the new 15 percent tariffs began at midnight on Tuesday as IEEPA tariff collections of 10 percent to 50 percent halted.
The Section 122 law allows the president to impose duties of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days on any and all countries to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits and “fundamental international payments problems.”
Trump’s tariff order argued that a serious balance of payments deficit existed in the form of a $1.2 trillion annual US goods trade deficit and a current account deficit of 4 percent of GDP and a reversal of the US primary income surplus.
Some economists, including former International Monetary Fund First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath, disagreed with the Trump administration’s alarm.
“We can all agree that the US is not facing a balance of payment crisis, which is when countries experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access to financial markets,” Gopinath told Reuters.
Gopinath rejected the White House’s claim that a negative balance on the US primary income for the first time since 1960 was evidence of a large and serious balance of payment problem.
She attributed the negative balance to a large increase in foreign purchases of US equities and risky assets over the past decade, which outperformed foreign equities over this period.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury and IMF official, said that balance of payments crises are more associated with countries that have fixed exchange rates, and noted that the floating-rate dollar has been steady, the 10-year Treasury yield fairly stable, with US stocks performing well.
Josh Lipsky, chair of international economics at the Atlantic Council think tank, agreed, noting that a balance of payments crisis occurred when a country could not pay for what it was importing or was unable to service foreign debt. That was fundamentally different from a trade deficit, he added.
Brad Setser, a currency and trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a senior adviser to the US Trade Representative in the Biden administration, took a somewhat contrarian view, arguing in lengthy X posts on Sunday that the Trump administration may have a reasonable case that there is a “large and serious” balance of payments deficit.
He noted that the current account deficit was far higher than when then-president Richard Nixon erected tariffs in 1971 to address a balance of payments crisis, and the US net international investment position is much worse. This “gives the administration a real argument,” in favor of its tariffs, Setser wrote.
The White House, US Treasury and US Trade Representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the use of Section 122.
WRONG STATUTE FOR THE JOB
Despite the Trump administration’s new focus on balance of payments, the Justice Department had previously argued that Section 122 was the wrong statute to handle a national emergency over the trade deficit.
In court filings in its defense of IEEPA tariffs, the Justice Department said Section 122 would not have “any obvious application here, where the concerns the president identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”
Neal Katyal, who argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiffs challenging the IEEPA tariffs, told CNBC that the Trump administration’s stance against the use of Section 122 for a trade deficit will make those tariffs vulnerable to litigation.
“I’m not sure it will necessarily even need to get to the Supreme Court, but if the president adheres to this plan of using a statute that his own Justice Department has said he can’t use, yeah, I think that’s a pretty easy thing to litigate,” Katyal said.
It is unclear who might take the lead in challenging the Section 122 tariffs.
Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm representing several small businesses that challenged the IEEPA tariffs, said the group would closely monitor any new statutes being invoked.
Albrecht did not reveal any future litigation strategy, adding: “Our immediate focus is simple: making sure the refund process begins and that checks start flowing to the American businesses that paid those unconstitutional duties.”
In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not give instructions regarding refunds, instead remanding the case to a lower trade court to determine next steps.
Hours after the high court on Friday struck down a huge swath of tariffs Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president announced the new duties under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a never-used statute that even his own legal team dismissed as irrelevant months ago.
Collections of the new 15 percent tariffs began at midnight on Tuesday as IEEPA tariff collections of 10 percent to 50 percent halted.
The Section 122 law allows the president to impose duties of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days on any and all countries to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits and “fundamental international payments problems.”
Trump’s tariff order argued that a serious balance of payments deficit existed in the form of a $1.2 trillion annual US goods trade deficit and a current account deficit of 4 percent of GDP and a reversal of the US primary income surplus.
Some economists, including former International Monetary Fund First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath, disagreed with the Trump administration’s alarm.
“We can all agree that the US is not facing a balance of payment crisis, which is when countries experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access to financial markets,” Gopinath told Reuters.
Gopinath rejected the White House’s claim that a negative balance on the US primary income for the first time since 1960 was evidence of a large and serious balance of payment problem.
She attributed the negative balance to a large increase in foreign purchases of US equities and risky assets over the past decade, which outperformed foreign equities over this period.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury and IMF official, said that balance of payments crises are more associated with countries that have fixed exchange rates, and noted that the floating-rate dollar has been steady, the 10-year Treasury yield fairly stable, with US stocks performing well.
Josh Lipsky, chair of international economics at the Atlantic Council think tank, agreed, noting that a balance of payments crisis occurred when a country could not pay for what it was importing or was unable to service foreign debt. That was fundamentally different from a trade deficit, he added.
Brad Setser, a currency and trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a senior adviser to the US Trade Representative in the Biden administration, took a somewhat contrarian view, arguing in lengthy X posts on Sunday that the Trump administration may have a reasonable case that there is a “large and serious” balance of payments deficit.
He noted that the current account deficit was far higher than when then-president Richard Nixon erected tariffs in 1971 to address a balance of payments crisis, and the US net international investment position is much worse. This “gives the administration a real argument,” in favor of its tariffs, Setser wrote.
The White House, US Treasury and US Trade Representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the use of Section 122.
WRONG STATUTE FOR THE JOB
Despite the Trump administration’s new focus on balance of payments, the Justice Department had previously argued that Section 122 was the wrong statute to handle a national emergency over the trade deficit.
In court filings in its defense of IEEPA tariffs, the Justice Department said Section 122 would not have “any obvious application here, where the concerns the president identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”
Neal Katyal, who argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiffs challenging the IEEPA tariffs, told CNBC that the Trump administration’s stance against the use of Section 122 for a trade deficit will make those tariffs vulnerable to litigation.
“I’m not sure it will necessarily even need to get to the Supreme Court, but if the president adheres to this plan of using a statute that his own Justice Department has said he can’t use, yeah, I think that’s a pretty easy thing to litigate,” Katyal said.
It is unclear who might take the lead in challenging the Section 122 tariffs.
Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm representing several small businesses that challenged the IEEPA tariffs, said the group would closely monitor any new statutes being invoked.
Albrecht did not reveal any future litigation strategy, adding: “Our immediate focus is simple: making sure the refund process begins and that checks start flowing to the American businesses that paid those unconstitutional duties.”
In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not give instructions regarding refunds, instead remanding the case to a lower trade court to determine next steps.
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