A JURY will retire on Monday to begin determining the fate of slaughterhouse worker Jamie Cust, who claims he "freaked out" after awaking to a sexual assault from a colleague in a unit at Scone in 2018 and in a "frenzied" attack stabbed him 49 times.
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Mr Cust does not deny inflicting the wounds, but the sole issue at the trial has been whether or not he was operating under "extreme provocation", a partial defence that, if not eliminated beyond reasonable doubt by the prosecution, would reduce Mr Cust's criminal liability from murder to manslaughter.
The closing addresses on Friday focused on that central issue with both Crown prosecutor Brendan Queenan and defence barrister Paul Rosser, QC, suggesting that, if the jury accepted Mr Cust's claims that he had "stabbed" Mr Bebita "because he tried to rape me", then they would ask themselves a number of questions.
The test for extreme provocation is whether the act that killed Mr Bebita was in response to Mr Bebita's conduct, whether what Mr Bebita had done constituted a serious indictable offence, whether it was that conduct that caused Mr Cust to "lose self-control" and, crucially, whether the conduct of Mr Bebita would have caused an "ordinary person" to lose control to the extent where they would intend to kill or cause really serious injury.
Mr Queenan told the jury that even if they accepted Mr Cust's version then they would not accept that what had occurred inside the unit would have caused an "ordinary person" to lose control.
"You might think the appropriate response is to say "I'm not interested", to push him off the bed," Mr Queenan said. "It wouldn't be to stab him 49 times."
Mr Rosser said something "dramatic" must have occurred for Mr Cust to brutally attack Mr Bebita and Mr Cust's version and independent scientific evidence fit that description.
