ABSTRACT
I was contacted by a firm of solicitors to give evidence as an expert witness in a murder trial. I will return to the murder trial at the end of this chapter. The defendant was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in jail for murder. Whether he actually murdered the woman seems to me to be an open question. However, he did kill her. He confessed to the killing the next day. Murder seems to imply intention. I do not think that there was an intention to kill her. It was a sexual paraphilia, combined with alcohol intoxication that became a disaster. In working with men with addiction and a paraphilia, it would be almost impossible to encounter such a distressing an event. In English law ‘an individual is not able to consent to receive an act that will cause them serious harm’ (Proulx et al. 2007: 14).
