Prosecutors seek life without parole for mushroom poisoner Erin Patterson in appeal hearing

In a Victorian court of appeal, the legal reckoning over Erin Patterson's triple murder convictions has entered a new and consequential phase. A single lunch — beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms — claimed three lives and left one survivor, and now the machinery of justice turns on questions of sentencing gravity, jury integrity, and the boundaries of evidence. What is at stake is not only one woman's fate, but the standards by which Australian courts will measure the most serious of crimes and the fairness of the processes that judge them.