The jury in the Samoan tattooist murder trial has retired to consider its verdict at the High Court in Auckland today after hearing Justice Susan Glazebrook sum up.
Earlier the Crown prosecutor, Richard Marchant, told the jury Paulo Suluape had made a fatal choice when his wife asked if he was
leaving her for good.
"He had two choices- one 'I am staying' and he lives. The other, 'I am going' and he dies."
"He gave the wrong answer and he died," Mr Marchant told the court.
Epifania Suluape is accused of murdering her husband by bludgeoning him with the blunt side of an axe in the sleepout at their Otara home in November 1999.
Mr Marchant, appearing with Howard Lawry, told the jury in his final address that Suluape killed her husband after becoming increasingly angry and agitated because of her husband's affair with a Swedish woman.
He said that she had been "cold and clinical" in getting the axe, deliberately using the back of the weapon so that she would not have to witness the horror of his head being split open like a water melon.
Suluape was lying, Mr Marchant said, when she described her husband as an incredibly violent man.
Kevin Ryan, QC, appearing for the defence with Ron Mansfield, said that Suluape "lost it," snapping after years of accumulated insults, hurt and abuse.
She stood by her faithless husband, despite his many betrayals, the atrocities and attacks on her soul and the battering of her spirit.
All the years of drudgery, slavery, lack of companionship and consideration came welling up, said Mr Ryan.
Rational thought, he said, was "dethroned."
Mr Ryan said that her husband had paraded his Swedish lover in Samoa and had sex with her in the same motel room as Suluape's daughter, a hugely insulting thing for any Samoan woman to endure.
Mr Ryan said it was like Suluape had a tumour because of the indifference and failure of her husband to treat her as a mother, a wife and even as a human being.
"At the time it happened, her reason had gone," he said.
