R v Ludbrook

The Court sentenced the offender to 19 years' imprisonment (14-year non-parole period) for murder committed while in a drug-induced altered state caused by the novel synthetic drug 2-fluoro-2-oxo-PCE, holding that while the jury's guilty verdict established the stabbing was conscious, voluntary and deliberate with reckless murderous intent, the offender's severely impaired capacity for moral reasoning due to the drug significantly moderated his moral culpability. The Court held that self-induced intoxication is not an aggravating factor where the drug's effects were not anticipated or foreseeable, but does not entirely remove moral responsibility where the offender voluntarily consumed an illicit, untested substance. In obiter, the Court identified an unresolved doctrinal difficulty: the mental impairment defence is unavailable for drug-induced states even where the offender could not tell right from wrong, leaving no intermediate verdict between conviction and acquittal for self-induced intoxication cases.