Recent content by Amalgam

Amatoxin is more a water soluble poison than a lipid(fat) soluble poison. Her extra weight is mostly fat (no delicate way to say it) so it isn’t relevant. Furthermore the time between the deadly meal and the victims presentation at the hospital indicates that the dose of poison ingested was...

That would make sense. I’ve seen so much wildly inaccurate reporting during this regarding mushroom toxicity and given the quote above was in response to my post discussing threshold level toxicity, I totally overlooked that this is indeed right in the ballpark in terms of the quantity of DC...

10 decent sized DC mushrooms sounds awfully high. The amatoxin content of death cap mushrooms ranges between 1240-2950 milligrams per kilogram of dried whole mushrooms. The minimum lethal dose for amatoxin is 0.1 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. This works out to 7-10mg for people in...

Yes, really. You would need at least a teaspoonful of dried death caps to hurt or kill somebody. If you look up the amatoxin content range for death caps per gram of mushroom and then compare that with the lethal dose range, traces aren’t very harmful. Furthermore the time delay between eating...

If she knows as much about mushrooms and foraging as has been claimed, it would be no surprise if she was quite comfortable using a single dehydrator for both death caps and any other mushrooms or foodstuffs she wanted to dehydrate. If you mean she had two dehydrators as part of some cunning...

No danger of poisoning if you were to eat edible mushrooms that were dried in a dehydrator previously used to dry death caps with spores and other microscopic traces of death cap remaining in the dehydrator. If this was the case and Erin ate the same meal as her guests, how did she avoid...

If she depletes her assets beyond a certain point she will be able to get legal aid, and when facing charges like this you can get an excellent lawyer on the taxpayer’s dime. The Claremont serial killer, Bradley Edwards is a case in point.

I think SouthAussie’s reply above could well be part of the reason. The news report I read stated that it was because she hasn’t been convicted. An article on news.com.au states : “Due to the seriousness of her charges she is unlikely to be allowed to mingle with the general prison population.”

Even though the magistrate who presided over Erin’s first court hearing had no power to grant bail, he did ask Erin’s lawyer, Bill Doogue if there would be a bail application. His answer was “Unfortunately, no.” If she feels her prospects of avoiding a conviction on every charge is slim, she...

With only media reports to go on, she seems to see herself as highly intelligent, especially when compared to the ‘barely literate’ ‘country folk’ of Leongatha. This is of course a very narrow and limited slice of a much larger whole.

Even IF Erin suffers from a psychiatric illness, I think her chances of a successful mental health defense are very slim. She must prove that at the time of the alleged offending, 1) … the accused was suffering from a mental impairment that had the effect that – (a) he or she did not know...

I agree. But nor are plenty of convicted felons who find themselves in jail.

I don’t think inmates awaiting trial and therefore entitled to the presumption of innocence are required to work in prison, but if Erin is convicted she could always take a leaf out of Judy Moran’s playbook and suddenly find herself in need of a wheelchair and medically unfit for work.

To get off on mental health grounds requires far more than a psychiatric illness. It is a high bar to clear. That said, a nurse I know who worked in a secure forensic ward for the criminally insane (as they were then called) stated that at least one patient who was in there following a...

I couldn’t agree with you more strongly. I only repeated it to point out why people might opine that she has a history of looking unkempt.