Daughter guilty of SA ex-pat mother's manslaughter

The daughter of an acclaimed scientist has been found guilty of her mother’s manslaughter after poisoning her with a drug known as ‘green dream’. According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, Barbara Eckersley (69) faced a New South Wales Supreme Court trial in Goulburn this month over the death of Dr Mary White (92). White, who suffered from dementia and a stroke, was found dead at a nursing home in Bundanoon in the NSW Southern Highlands on 5 August 2018. Her daughter was arrested and charged three days later. A jury found Eckersley not guilty of White’s murder but guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The trial heard she put the animal euthanasia drug pentobarbital, known as ‘green dream’, into her mother’s soup in the hours before her death. Eckersley had argued she did not intend to kill her mother, instead intending to make her comfortable while in her care, and was suffering from a major depressive disorder at the time, which impaired her ability to reason. White, a renowned paleobotanist and author, had moved from SA to Australia with her family in 1955. One of her books, After The Greening: The Browning of Australia (1994), won the Eureka Prize. In 2009, she was named a Member of the Order of Australia ‘for service to botany as a researcher and through the promotion of increased understanding and awareness of the natural world’. Justice Robert Beech-Jones will hear sentence submissions in Goulburn today ahead of a sentence likely to be handed down on 20 May. Eckersley remains on bail.