Hakyung Lee, the mother of Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8, is charged with their murders. Photo: Lawrence Smith/ Stuff Pool
The woman accused of killing her two children and concealing their bodies had previously told many versions of lies relating to the deaths of her children, says the Crown.
The jury heard the closing arguments today from both the Crown and the defence in the trial of Hakyung "Jasmine" Lee, who admitted causing her children's deaths in 2018 by giving them an overdose of sleeping pills, before putting them in suitcases in a storage unit in Papatoetoe.
Lee, who is self-representing and assisted by stand-by counsel, maintains she is not guilty by reason of insanity.
Her defence rests on her "descent into madness" after her husband died from cancer in November 2017, and that she wanted to kill herself and her children to spare them the pain of a parentless life.
In her closing, prosecutor Natalie Walker reminded the jury of earlier evidence from forensic psychiatrist Dr Erik Monasterio, that Lee's actions following the killing of her children - including changing her name, accessing a storage facility, and cleaning and vacating her rental property before flying business class to South Korea - showed that she had maintained capacity to undertake "complex and cognitively demanding activities".
Walker walked the jury through a timeline of what she argued was a series of lies Lee had told family, police and doctors about the deaths of her children.
In June 2022, when a pastor at Lee's mother's church in Hamilton received a call from a hospital in South Korea, Lee spoke to her mother for the first time since she left New Zealand after the killing.
When asked by her mother what happened to the children, Lee said: "Mum, I don't have kids."
Walker argued this is the first of many lies she would go on to tell about children.
Lee later confessed for the first time to forensic psychiatrist Dr Yvette Kelly that she had killed the children, but insisted that it was secondary to her main purpose of killing herself.
"To Doctor Kelly, Ms Lee described a spontaneous, misguidedly altruistic act by a mother who wasn't in her right mind, who wanted to take her own life, and who thought that killing the children in those circumstances was the morally right thing to do, I suggest this later story was Ms Lee's fourth major lie in relation to the deaths of her children," said Walker.
Walker argued that Lee's claims of attempting to take her own life twice after the deaths of her children - first by taking sleeping pills, then by hanging - were not supported by any evidence other than her own accounts.
She pointed to Dr Monasterio's earlier evidence that while Lee told him she had heard hallucinatory voices telling her to kill the children, he concluded that there was no evidence of any symptoms of psychosis, and that she did not reach the threshold for having a "disease of the mind" around the alleged time of the killing.
Dr Monasterio said there was no evidence to show she did not know the moral wrongfulness of her actions, thereby concluding the defence of insanity was not available to Lee.
Walker told the jury that a person is assumed to be sane until the contrary is proven, and that the onus was on Lee to prove that she was more likely to be insane than not, around the time of the offending.
Lee must show that she was suffering from a disease of the mind that affected her in such a way that she did not know her actions were morally wrong.
Walker said Lee's actions following the deaths of the children, including wrapping them in layers of plastic bags, then putting them in suitcases and storage was no easy task and showed she knew what she was doing.
"I want to suggest to you - that that action on Ms Lee's part would've taken considerable effort.
"It would've required real planning, real care, real determination that that was what she was going to achieve, and real effort," said Walker.
In Lee's defence, stand-by counsel Lorraine Smith told the jury in her closing address that Lee has always had a fragile mental state and began her "descent into hell" after her husband died.
She painted a picture of a woman who's had three suicide attempts - including once when she was just 18, shortly before her father passed away - and relied on others to catch her and "rebalance her" when she was struggling.
Having moved to New Zealand with her parents as a 13-year-old, Lee was split between the Korean world and the new culture in Auckland, Smith said.
Smith said Lee's marriage to her husband was the longest period of good mental health in her life, and that had crumbled when he died.
Smith said Lee had no human support in the seven months following her husband's death, and that her social circle had shrunk to "nothing".
Lee went through a very dark time when she irrationally believed that the only answer is to kill herself and her children, Smith said.
Smith said Lee believed she had caused her husband and her father's death, and her son's cleft pallet, demonstrating that she was "disconnected from reality".
Smith urged the jury to look at the whole "clinical picture" of Lee's mental health, and that whether she had psychosis or not, she was tormented by the voices in her head.
Lee was a fragile woman who needed support that was not there, and she had killed her children in her fractured frame of mind, driven by mental illness, Smith argued.
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