Medical evidence regarding what was termed "battered wife syndrome" is to be given in Northern Ireland in a murder trial next month, it was stated in the Appeal Court in Belfast yesterday.
Three judges upheld an appeal by Ms Karen McDonnell (34), from Moorfields, near Ballymena, Co Antrim, and ordered a retrial on a charge of murdering her husband.
The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert Carswell, said they were taking this course as defence lawyers intended to call two medical experts to give evidence that Ms McDonnell was suffering from "battered wife syndrome".
Ms McDonnell was in court for the brief hearing and was taken back to prison to await the new trial next month.
She was sentenced to life imprisonment in April 1998, after being convicted of murdering her husband, Mr Joe McDonnell, a lance corporal in the RIR, whom she had married a year earlier.
The trial jury was told he was stabbed to death during a late-night drunken row.
She claimed her husband ran on to a kitchen knife as he came at her but the Crown argued she deliberately stabbed him in the chest.
The Lord Chief Justice, sitting with Lord Justice Nicholson and Mr Justice Kerr, said the court had been given reports by Dr Gillian Mezey and Dr Janet Harbinson, consultant forensic psychiatrists.
He said the weight which could be attributed to statements made at different times by Ms McDonnell would turn very largely on the evidence of the two expert witnesses whom he described as distinguished members of their profession.