Erin Patterson Lost Her Parole Date Over Solitary Confinement

Erin Patterson’s convictions stand. The sentence Justice Christopher Beale imposed on them does not, in the form he gave it. On Friday, Victoria’s Court of Appeal dismissed her challenge to her convictions for three murders and one attempted murder, and in the same sitting removed the 33-year non-parole period Beale had fixed. She will serve life imprisonment with no date on which she can ask to be released.

Beale had already described the offending as being in the worst category, and he imposed three life sentences for the murders of Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson, with 25 years for the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, to run concurrently. The non-parole period answered a different question: how the conditions of her custody could count in the sentence at all.

He had heard that Patterson, held since her arrest on 2 November 2023, had spent the 15 months before sentencing effectively in continuous solitary confinement, and that there was, in his words, “a substantial chance” she would remain in it for years. “The harsh prison conditions that you have experienced already and the likely prospect of solitary confinement for the foreseeable future are important and weighty considerations which should count for something in the sentencing exercise,” he said. “In my view, the only scope for making them count is by the fixing of a non-parole period.”

That was the choice the statute left him. Under section 11 of Victoria’s Sentencing Act 1991, a court imposing life imprisonment must fix a non-parole period unless it considers the nature of the offence, or the offender’s history, makes that inappropriate. The Adult Parole Board puts the exception plainly: a small number of Victorian prisoners serve life with no non-parole period and are never eligible for release on parole. Beale did not use the exception. He fixed 33 years, with credit for 676 days already spent in custody, which would have made Patterson eligible to apply for parole in 2056, in her early 80s.

The prosecution’s answer arrived in a notice of appeal. Acting Director of Public Prosecutions Diana Piekusis KC argued that Beale had “erred in finding that there was a ‘substantial chance’ the respondent would be held in solitary confinement for years to come when such a finding was not open on the evidence, and that finding infected his assessment of the respondent’s likely future conditions in custody and his decision to fix a non-parole period.” The sentence, the filing said, was “manifestly inadequate”: either it was inappropriate to fix a non-parole period at all, or 33 years was itself manifestly inadequate. The Court of Appeal, on Friday, took the first of those two alternatives.

Time was the argument underneath the filing. At the plea hearing in August 2025, Crown prosecutor Jane Warren had told the court that Patterson’s fame would die down. “At some point people will lose interest,” she said, though she could not say when. She had asked for life without parole, calling the crimes “so horrific, so cruel and so callous” that Patterson was “not deserving of mercy.”

Beale did not accept that the attention would fade. Patterson was, he said, likely to remain a notorious prisoner for many years, with books, documentaries and television programmes in preparation, and her notoriety was “not going to diminish.” The custody record before him was stark: between 22 and 24 hours a day alone in the maximum-security Gordon Unit at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, food passed through a trap door, and permission to communicate with one other prisoner. A small exercise yard, a treadmill and a library were available only on request, and not always then, the court heard, because of resourcing problems at the centre. He also told her the unit existed for her protection: “You are in a management unit to protect you from other prisoners, not vice versa, nor do you have any relevant criminal history.” In the same week as the appeal decision, a streaming service announced that Melanie Lynskey would play Patterson in a six-part dramatisation of the case.

That record is what the defence called solitary confinement, as defined by the United Nations. The UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules define solitary confinement as confinement for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact, and prolonged solitary confinement as more than 15 consecutive days, permitted only in exceptional cases, as a last resort, for the shortest time, subject to independent review. Patterson’s day met the definition on its face. The prosecution’s reply was not that the hours were wrong, but that they were not fixed: Corrections Victoria reviewed her conditions every month, she had access to a library and a chaplain, and notoriety fades.

Justice Stephen McLeish, speaking for himself, Justice Lesley Taylor and Justice Peter Kidd, sided with the second reading. He described the offending as “extraordinarily cold and calculated”, characterised by “an elaborate series of deceptions”: the false claim of cancer used to explain why her own children were not at the lunch, the planning of the meal, the destruction of evidence, the “cruel breach of trust” of relatives who trusted her. The intent to murder, the court found, was sustained for nearly three weeks, from the invitations through the lunch and the suffering that followed. “In all the circumstances, after anxious consideration, we have concluded that the case involved such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period,” McLeish said.

The prosecution had not hidden the weight of what it sought. Brendan Kissane KC, for the Director of Public Prosecutions, acknowledged at the August hearing that removing any prospect of release had its harsh aspect. “It has its harsh aspect to it, of course, we accept that. But in our submission that is not a matter that is outweighed by the seriousness of the offending,” he said. Prosecutors had pressed for no parole period, or one so long she would likely die in prison, even though she would already have been in her 80s at first eligibility under Beale’s sentence.

The ordinary voices the decision drew did not argue the point the courts argued. Traci King, posting on Threads as @traci.king, wrote: “She appealed, wanting her conviction thrown out and the judge said no and have her a harsher sentence! Well done Australia!!” Rob Smith, on X as @Ausbobsmit in the early hours of 30 October, put it as a gamble that failed: “Erin Patterson went back for her hat and lost the lot. Her appeal backfired.”

Andrew Elle, also on Threads, read the case differently from everyone in the courtroom. “Her actions by definition are FAMILY VIOLENCE,” Elle wrote, arguing that “the gender argument needs to be ended in terms of FV offenders, better off turning that energy around to fight family violence, not whether which gender is worse.” None of the three posts engages with the question the two courts actually decided: whether a judge may assume solitary confinement will last for years. The public argument in them is about desert: the appeal deserved to fail, and to fail harder. The courts’ argument was about forecasting. Kissane conceded the harshness of what the prosecution sought, and Chesser was surprised the court removed the date altogether. The reaction in these posts shows no such surprise, because it was never weighing the custody record at all.

Patterson’s own appeal, heard in the same August sitting, failed on all seven grounds. Leave to argue was granted on two only. The first concerned the jury’s accommodation: jurors had stayed in the same hotel as police and prosecution staff, which her barrister Richard Edney called a “catastrophic” and “fundamental irregularity”, though he conceded at the hearing that there was no evidence anyone had communicated with the jurors. The second concerned the admissibility of mobile-phone tower data placing her where death cap mushrooms had been recorded. The court called the hotel arrangement “highly undesirable and plainly unfortunate” but found no basis to believe the jury had been contaminated, and held the phone data admissible. The other five grounds were dismissed without leave. They covered the excluded SD-card photographs and videos of foraging, evidence from Facebook “friends” about hiding mushrooms in food, five days of cross-examination said to be oppressive, and a closing address said to introduce a new motive.

The removal, rather than a lengthening, is what surprised the experts. Victoria’s standard non-parole period for murder is 20 years, and where there is more than one victim the minimum is 25. The man who killed six people on Bourke Street and was sentenced in 2019 received 46 years. Brianna Chesser, associate professor of criminology and justice at RMIT, had expected the Court of Appeal to raise Patterson’s period, “maybe to 37 years”. “But to remove it altogether was definitely a shock,” she said. At sentencing she had put Patterson “closer to 30 than 40 because of the conditions.”

Patterson is the first woman in Victoria, and only the second woman in Australia, to receive life without parole. The first was Katherine Knight, sentenced in New South Wales in 2001 after pleading guilty to the murder of John Price, her file marked “never to be released”. Knight’s path to the sentence ran through a guilty plea. Patterson’s ran through a trial, a sentence that allowed for release, and a prosecution appeal that removed it.

One avenue remains. Patterson has 28 days to seek special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia, and the Court of Appeal’s orders anticipate any application being filed by 27 November. Special leave is permission, not a right: the High Court takes cases that raise a question of law of public importance, or where the interests of justice require it. Chesser put the odds plainly: about 90 per cent of applications do not cross the hurdle, and the court “only deals with cases that shape national law”. A case needs, in her words, an “egregious procedural irregularity” or a human rights violation. She still expects Patterson to try, and to exhaust every avenue left to her.

Patterson watched the hearing on a video link from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. When the judges rose, she stood, picked up a book from beside her, and walked out of view.