A WOMAN who stabbed her upstairs neighbour after a row about loud
music was insane at the time, a jury has decided.
Victoria Whyte's rare defence of insanity was accepted by the jury at
Edinburgh Sheriff Court, which decided that she did attack Mr Norman
Pearson in the Granton Medway, Edinburgh, on September 17 last year, but
acquitted her.
Sheriff Andrew Bell sent Whyte, 31, to the State Mental Hospital at
Carstairs. The sheriff turned down a plea from her solicitor, Mr Martin
Collins, to send her back to the Queen Margaret Hospital, Dunfermline,
where she was treated after the incident.
Whyte, from Stockport, a single mother with a three-year-old daughter,
told the jury that she stabbed Mr Pearson in the backside but added: ''I
was so detached. It was as if it wasn't real.''
She said that, when she was being interviewed by police, she thought
she was in the police station in the TV series, The Bill.
Psychiatrist Alan Beveridge told the court that Whyte had suffered
''an acute psychotic episode''. He said staff at the Dunfermline
hospital were convinced her mental illness was genuine.
Mr Pearson, 33, a ventilation engineer, told the trial that he went
down to Whyte's flat to apologise after she sent a friend up to complain
about his loud music. He described how Whyte went for him on the common
stairs and stabbed him twice.
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