Woman who stabbed partner with steak knife guilty of murder for second time
A woman who stabbed her partner to death with a steak knife has been convicted of his murder for a second time following a retrial.
Emma-Jayne Magson, 28, from Leicester, killed 26-year-old James Knight with a single stab wound to the heart in March 2016 after a drunken row.
She denied murder at her first trial at Leicester Crown Court, claiming self-defence, but was convicted and jailed for life with a minimum term of 17 years at the end of 2016.
However, senior judges at the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial last year after hearing new psychiatric evidence showing the defence of diminished responsibility would have been available to Magson at her first trial.
Her second trial took place at Birmingham Crown Court where a jury again found her guilty of Mr Knight’s murder by a majority verdict of 10 to two on Friday.
As the verdict was read out, Magson, wearing a pink top and dark trousers, stood with her hands clasped together, covering the lower part of her face.
Afterwards, she swayed momentarily before sitting back down with her shoulders slumped forward.
Mr Justice Jeremy Baker told her she would be sentenced at the same court on March 29.
Magson’s application for a retrial was supported by campaign group Justice for Women.
It was granted after her legal team claiming her murder conviction was unsafe because evidence about her mental health was not put before the original jury.
Her lawyers told three senior judges she was suffering from emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD), having endured a childhood which was characterised by exposure to domestic violence and after being bullied at school.
Launching Magson’s appeal in December 2019, Clare Wade QC said her client had a ‘volatile’ relationship with Knight – who was stabbed after kicking at her front door ‘in circumstances where the deceased had been violent to her earlier in the evening’.
She submitted that Magson’s condition ‘substantially impaired her ability to exercise self-control and that the EUPD provides an explanation for her conduct and was a significant contributory factor causing the applicant to stab the deceased’.
That evidence, Ms Wade argued, meant it is ‘more likely than not that at the time of the offence, the appellant was suffering from diminished responsibility’.
Ms Wade also argued Magson was unable to participate fully in her trial, saying her ‘impoverished verbal reasoning skills, EUPD and social communication difficulties’ had ‘compromised’ her ability to properly instruct her lawyers.
In their judgment granting a retrial, Lord Justice Fulford, Mr Justice William Davis and Mr Justice Johnson said: ‘We are confronted with the situation in which the prosecution and defence psychiatric experts have unequivocally concluded that there is, in their view, a strong basis for the appellant to contend that the correct verdict was manslaughter and not murder.
‘On the evidence now available, we are left in no doubt as to whether the applicant was rightly convicted of murder and it follows that the appeal, on this basis, must be allowed, given this option was not left for the jury’s consideration.’
During her second trial, jurors were told of Magson’s violent past, which includes ‘putting a glass over someone’s head’ in 2012 and a string of other incidents.
On another occasion, the court heard, she threw a vacuum cleaner at her first serious partner – prompting his friend to give her the nickname ‘Mike Dyson’.
Magson denied the hoover incident, and claimed another ex lied about being stabbed by her with a fork.
The one-time care home worker had two previous convictions for violence from 2012; one where she kicked and pulled the hair of another girl, and another from October 27 that year, in which she glassed another female, while drunk, cutting the victim’s face.
Jurors heard there were also incidents of violence towards Mr Knight.
In mid-March 2016, days before the fatal incident, Magson said she had an ‘emotional breakdown’, post-miscarriage, and during an argument with Mr Knight in his car, ‘ended up kicking out, kicking my legs to his head – I kicked the indicators off’.
On March 21, 2016, a week before the stabbing, the couple exchanged text messages in which Magson said ‘we ain’t good for each other…I am no good for you, take care’.
Mr Knight replied: ‘That’s cool, I’m not there for you to speak to like shit and hit.’
Prosecutor Mary Prior QC told jurors the subsequent deletion of texts, changing of clothes and hiding of the knife all pointed towards Magson being a ‘perpetrator’ of a deliberate act.
In her closing speech, Ms Prior asked jurors: ‘In taking a knife and stabbing James Knight towards his heart, what else, we say to you, could you intend?’
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