Monday 25 July 2011

A Case Of Gamekeeper Turned Poacher?

A former psychiatric nurse has been locked up in a mental health unit after starting fires at a block of flats she had been evicted from.
Maybe it’s contagious?
Oyeronke Adigun, aged 47, used petrol cans to start three fires outside the flats in Main Road, Biggin Hill, on February 21, and damaged the intercom system with a hammer on February 14.
The damage to the intercom system seems to be out of touch with the ‘Oh, she’s mad, poor dear, can’t help herself, doesn’t know what she’s doing!’ attitude, surely?
Judge Peter Murphy made an order that Adigun, from Nigeria, cannot be released until doctors and the court are satisfied she no longer poses a risk of harm to the public.
Why can’t she just be deported back to Nigeria? Where she'd definitely not be any danger to the public?
Mr Clayton said Adigun had also tried to start fires at the flats on several previous occasions, travelling there via minicab from her home in Campshill Road, Lewisham, and stopping on the way to buy petrol cans.
He said she would make her attempts “in the early hours of the morning, when the tenants were asleep” and would “press the buzzer, trying to get into the block of flats”.
There’s a rather nasty element of planning in that…
Dr Janet Parrott, a consultant forensic psychiatrist at the unit, who is responsible for Adigun’s treatment, told the court she has a “serious mental illness” and suffers from paranoia and depression.
So why is this our problem?

5 comments:

Shinar's Basket Case said...

It is a common misconception that insanity makes you stoopid or incapable of things like 'advance planning'.

It doesn't.

Infact a true paranoid will be a master of advance planning...it's the only way they can survive when the whole world is against them.

*checks today's listings of Black Helicopter sightings*

john b said...

"from Nigeria" doesn't mean she isn't a British citizen. In which case, unless she does actively treasonous things, which this isn't, she has the same right to stay as any other British citizen.

If she's not a British citizen, it'd be very unusual for the judge confronted with someone convicted of something so serious not to have made an order for deportation on release at the time of sentencing. No idea whether he's done so in this case. Yet another case where the fact that court transcripts aren't available online is stupid and annoying.

Re deportation: I'm not convinced that the suggestion that we should send foreign criminals home otherwise unpunished to save money is a great one, for fairly obvious reasons.

Anonymous said...

'Oyeronke Adigun lost her job at Mayday Psychiatric Hospital'.

How the hell did she get a job at.....oh, it's run by a parrott.

Anonymous said...

The UK - importing the mentally ill in spades since 1997

:-)

JuliaM said...

"It is a common misconception that insanity makes you stoopid or incapable of things like 'advance planning'."

Well, I've actually read that as a defence of a diagnosis on mental illness more than once...

""from Nigeria" doesn't mean she isn't a British citizen."

True enough. So yes, court transcripts would have helped.

"The UK - importing the mentally ill in spades since 1997 "

SNORK!