Ramya Nagesh

She told police that she'd thought that there was a fire.

She'd been dreaming that there was a fire and she was trying to save her family.

She had no previous convictions.

Everybody said that she was a good mother.

And her story that she'd been asleep at the time that she threw her baby out of the window was unheard of in England at the time.

So then there was a debate between sort of the prosecution and the judge as to how they should proceed.

And the judge, you know, wasn't really having any of it at first.

He said, well, you know, she was probably drunk.

If I let her go now, he said, she might go back to her family and throw another one out.

But her solicitor pushed for there to be no charge in the case, and eventually the judge allowed her bail.

Ultimately, there was never a trial in the case, and so effectively, her defense had been successful.

There is a condition called REM sleep disorder where you can act out your dreams.

But that's more rare than sleepwalking, which happens in a different stage of sleep when you're not dreaming.

And so people don't tend to act out their dreams.

Now, people generally are very aware of it.

There was sort of an explosion, if you like, of sleepwalking cases, relatively speaking, in the early 2000s and mid-2000s.

I think that's when it really started becoming something that people realized could lead you to commit crimes and therefore could be a defense.

He was a married man.

He had a history of sleepwalking.

And at the time of the incident in question, he'd been under extreme financial stress.