The trial of the mother accused of murdering her three children at their Timaru home begins in Christchurch on Monday and Lauren Dickason is using the defence of infanticide.
Infanticide is a rare crime, for a woman that causes the death of her child under the age of 10 because of a disturbed mind relating to childbirth or lactation.
It was a tragedy that first rocked the small town of Timaru and then the world.
A young South African family, new immigrants, who, in 2021, had only been in New Zealand two weeks after a stint in MIQ when mother Lauren Dickason allegedly killed her three children - six-year-old Liane and two-year-old twins Maya and Karla.
Her husband, orthopaedic surgeon Graham Dickason, found the three children dead and his wife in a serious condition when he came home from dinner with colleagues.
Lauren has been in a psychiatric unit since but on Monday will be in court charged with the murder of her children.
"I imagine there won't be a lot of focus on the factual matters, of the homicides, the killings themselves because they are a given, the scrutiny will be on the competing views of the medical practitioners," lawyer Nigel Hampton KC said.
Lauren will use the defence of insanity but also infanticide - which is a rare and historic charge that is rarely seen in the courts here.
The Crimes Act defines it as: "Where at the time of the offence the balance of her mind was disturbed, by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth to that or any other child, or by reason of the effect of lactation."
It's almost never prosecuted as a crime in New Zealand.
"Again quite rarely, we see infanticide used as a defence, a partial defence to murder or manslaughter," Hampton said.
The case will shine a light on perinatal mental health.
"Peripartum stresses probably occur in about 40 percent of the population... depression somewhere around 15-20 percent, anxiety about the same," perinatal psychiatrist Dr Tayna Wright said.
The more extreme post-partum psychosis impacts 1 in 1000, but thoughts of harming our own children are more common than most people think.
"Nearly half of people, normal people that experience no mental illness, have some thoughts of harming their baby," Dr Wright said.
What happened to Lauren and her family will be laid out to a jury in the Christchurch High Court over two weeks, starting Monday.
