'Milkshake murder' appeal continues

An American housewife convicted of drugging her banker husband with a milkshake before beating him to death received an unfair trial in Hong Kong partly because prosecutors improperly told the jury she didn't want her psychiatrist to testify, a defense attorney said Tuesday.

The argument came on the second day of Nancy Kissel's appeal hearing in what has widely been called the "milkshake murder" case. Kissel was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 after a sensational three-month trial involving sordid testimony about drugs, alcohol and sex in the lives of wealthy expatriates.

Dressed in black and looking frail, Kissel listened as her attorney, Gerard McCoy, told the a panel of three judges that prosecutors presented evidence about his client's psychiatrist that was "prejudicial." McCoy said it was "not lawful and proper" for the prosecution to question Kissel in front of the jury about why she had declined to let her psychiatrist provide a psychiatric report during the trial.

"She has no obligation in law to answer those questions," he said.

"The plain intention of the prosecution is to undermine the credibility of the applicant because she refused to consent" to allowing the psychiatrist take the witness stand.

On Monday, McCoy said Kissel's appeal would be based on the argument of self-defense and provocation. He said that in the original trial, High Court Judge Michael Victor Lunn gave the seven-member jury confusing instructions on the definition of self-defense and this influenced the verdict.

But the prosecutor, Kevin Zervos, argued Tuesday that McCoy's criticism of the judge was "totally unjustified."

Zervos added, "My submission is that the judge was correct. The judge has given a correct direction when you look at it collectively and in context."

Kissel, a native of the U.S. state of Minnesota, has said she was defending herself when she killed her husband — an investment banker for Merrill Lynch — on Nov. 2, 2003 during a fight in their luxury apartment on Hong Kong Island.

The lurid testimony during the trial showed the couple's marriage in shambles. Prosecutors said Nancy Kissel had an affair with a repairman who worked on the family's vacation home in the northeastern U.S. state of Vermont. The defense said Robert Kissel was a whiskey-swilling, cocaine-snorting workaholic with a bad temper and a penchant for forcing his wife to endure painful anal sex.

Prosecutors said she drugged her husband with a strawberry milkshake spiked with the "date-rape drug" Rohypnol. Hours later, she bludgeoned him to death with a metal ornament in their bedroom, prosecutors said.

She had the body wrapped in a rug and asked maintenance workers at her apartment complex to move it to a storeroom, prosecutors said.

The hearing, scheduled for eight days, is to continue at Hong Kong's Court of Appeal on Wednesday.