Van Breda murder trial: 'Seizure highly controversial'

Fortuitous. That is what prosecutor Susan Galloway called the diagnosis of Henri van Breda's condition of juvenile myoclonic epilepsy.

Until Van Breda, 23, was diagnosed two weeks ago, two hours and 40 minutes were missing from the timeline he presented in his plea statement and in court testimony about the events at the family home in Stellenbosch on the night of January 26 2015.

But neurologist James Butler, the final defence witness, used the diagnosis to claim that Van Breda had a seizure on the night of the attacks then suffered amnesia for nearly three hours as he lay on the staircase at 12 Goske Street, De Zalze.

Galloway told Judge Siraj Desai in the Cape Town High Court on Wednesday: "Given the defence's case up until now, and then the fortuitous diagnosis of a type of epilepsy just recently, the accused can now say: 'Oh, hang on, I now suddenly have an explanation for those missing two hours and 40 minutes'."

Butler said Van Breda's case was the only one he knew of in which amnesia was claimed to have afflicted the accused subsequent to the commission of a crime and not at the time of the crime. This proved that Van Breda was not feigning illness in an attempt to be acquitted of the murders of his parents, Martin and Teresa, and brother Rudi, and the attempted murder of his sister, Marli.

"We have the undisputed evidence of two doctors who say the accused's injuries were deliberately self-inflicted. You said yesterday (Tuesday) that deception as a cognitive function falls away in a postictal (post-seizure state)," said Galloway, again expressing doubt that a seizure had taken place.

Desai told Butler: "The seizure in and of itself is an assumption."

But the neurologist insisted that there had been a seizure since Van Breda had wet his pants and had allegedly not known he had done so or that he had a bruise on his face.

Before the case was postponed to February for closing arguments, Desai told Butler that he was "not questioning his integrity in any way" but the diagnosis of a seizure almost three years later in the middle of a trial was "highly controversial".