Ramya Nagesh

The Supreme Court considered the matter in some detail and decided that actually the original judge was right.

And they set out some principles for considering cases of sleepwalking and how it should be characterized by the courts.

There are two aspects to it.

And one is whether or not the person poses a continuing danger.

And the second is whether or not the cause of the defect is internal or external.

And they really kind of focused on the continuing danger aspect because on the medical evidence,

Kenneth Parks was highly unlikely to commit such an offence again whilst asleep.

And so they said, well, effectively, in shorthand, they said there's no real point in finding him legally insane and sending him to hospital because there's nothing they can do for him.

And so he was fully acquitted and went on to kind of live his life quite quietly.

after that but that decision really made shockwaves nationally and internationally because it was the first time in modern history that somebody had committed such a brutal offence and been completely cleared of any responsibility because they'd been asleep so that's where we're left and I think that's why it exercises the public imagination so much and the public say well hang on a minute somebody's died here and we know who did it but we can't say anything more than that we can't do anything about it

And secondly, of course, the criminal law is based on punishment and rehabilitation of people who have consciously chosen to do things that are harmful to others or contrary to our kind of societal morals.

And the difficulty is in sleepwalking, we lose our ability to control what we're doing.

They will interview the defendant.

They will sometimes conduct sleep studies, which is where somebody goes into a hospital.

They fall asleep in a hospital.

They spend the night in a hospital, but they're hooked up to all sorts of machines which monitor their breathing, their heart rate, their activity, their brainwaves.

and then they determine, based on their history and the sleep study, the likelihood that they could have been sleepwalking at the time.

So it's not an easy defense.

It's not something that people can just fall onto and say, oh, I was asleep.

At trial, Scott Folletta tried to claim he was sleepwalking.